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15/7/2009

International Artist-In-Residence

Artpace San Antonio, San Antonio

Artpace San Antonio is pleased to announce New Works: 09.2 opening July 16, 2009. Guest Curator Kitty Scott, Director of Visual Arts, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff International Curatorial Institute, the Banff Center, Canada, will present new projects by Anne Collier (New York, NY), Charlie Morris (San Antonio, TX), and Silke Otto-Knapp (London, England).

About the artist:

New York-based artist Anne Collier photographs existing objects-including movie publicity stills, record sleeves, posters, magazines, and self-help manuals-in staged tableaux that she considers to be a form of photographic still-life. Her forensic, even detached, approach to making images is seemingly at odds with the often highly emotive and melancholic subjects she depicts. Referencing both popular culture and the growth in pop psychology since the 1970s in her art, Collier is drawn to the previous lives that these typically secondhand artifacts reveal through the traces of their former use. Her exploration of the act of looking and the mechanics of the photographic process has resulted in a highly conceptual yet strangely visceral body of work that considers the thresholds between the personal and the universal.

Collier received her MFA from UCLA in 2001. She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin, Germany (2009); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2008); Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, CA (2008); Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, United Kingdom (2008); Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2008); and Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY (2008). Her work has been included in many group exhibitions, including The Living and the Dead, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York, NY (2009); Correspondences, Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna, Austria (2009); Dispersion, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, United Kingdom (2008); and Unknown Pleasures, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2008).

about the exhibition
For her installation at Artpace, Woman With A Camera (35mm), Anne Collier created a durational slide projection piece featuring frames from the 1978 film Eyes of Laura Mars. The artist bought a vintage 35mm reel of the film's theatrical trailer and transformed individual frames into slides. She chose eighteen images from an early sequence in the promotional trailer that shows the lead actress, Faye Dunaway, in the process of taking a photograph and her subsequent surprised reaction to what she witnesses off-screen. The slides are projected at regular intervals and the complete cycle lasts several minutes. Although the installation has a pseudo-cinematic feel, Collier does not intend to promote or emulate the film. Rather she investigates the incongruity between how we experience film time and photographic time by isolating cinematic imagery so that it is closer to still pictures.

Upon entering Collier's installation, viewers are confronted with spare elements: a darkened room, short rows of unassuming stools, a freestanding screen angled slightly away from the entrance, and a slide projector that advances slides showing frames from Eyes of Laura Mars. The quiet room-punctuated only by the measured sound of the slide projector advancing to the next slide-creates a hybrid environment that reads as part micro-cinema and part art history lecture hall. As viewers sink into a metronomic contemplation of the slide sequence, a sense of narrative and heightened anticipation begins to develop, only to go unresolved as the projector loops back to the opening sequence. This spare and formal approach to images charged with emotive content is a signature aspect of Collier's highly conceptual work, and with this installation she introduces the element of time as well.

The artist's presentation of elements from the film Eyes of Laura Mars recalls her ongoing photography series that focuses on depictions of models or actresses posing as female photographers, such as Women With Cameras (2007) and Woman With A Camera (Cheryl Tiegs/Olympus #1) (2008). Woman With A Camera (diptych) (2006) is a diptych based on publicity stills again from Eyes of Laura Mars that contain similar images of Dunaway with her camera. About the theme of female photographers, Collier says that "these images typically reinforce highly stylized and often highly sexualized stereotypes." The artist concedes that these images also allude to aspects of her own biography: her photographs of female photographers and photography equipment can be read as surrogates for Collier herself.

Collier explains that she "is concerned with thinking about existing photographic conventions or existing manifestations of photographic imagery, and my attempts to infect or interrupt these conventions with more personal narratives, even if such narratives are only alluded to or hinted at." Collier often utilizes the eye motif as a way to introduce a combined universal and personal narrative in her work. The artist is interested in the eyes not only because they express emotion and feeling, but also because they are analogous in their function to a camera's recording of the outside world. By synthesizing the eye and camera, personal and universal, and emotive and detached, Collier's Woman With A Camera (35mm) continues her investigations into the nature of the photographic image.

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Silke Otto-Knapp

about the artist
Many of German-born Silke Otto-Knapp's paintings, drawings, and prints are inspired by the choreography of ballet and modern dance; her compositions are often populated by flat figures that appear to float on the surface of her canvases. Otto-Knapp creates tension between the artificiality of the surface and the reality of her imagery by using watercolor on canvas in a layering of textured washes. Her often monochromatic palette is reminiscent of distressed photographs enlivened with silver and gold pigments, imbuing her work with a reflective unpredictability that is equally disturbing and compelling.

Otto-Knapp received a degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Hildesheim, Germany, in 1997 and a MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, UK, in 1996. She has had solo exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford, London, UK (2009); Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, Canada (2009); Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, CA (2009); Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, Germany (2007); greengrassi, London, UK (2007), Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York, NY (2006); and Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Germany (2003). Her work has been included in many group exhibitions, including modern modern, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, NY (2009); Rendez-Vous Nowhere, Montehermoso Cultural Center, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain (2008); Art Sheffield 08: Yes, No & Other Options, UK (2008); Love in a void (with Jutta Koether), Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria (2006); 9th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2006); and The Undiscovered Country, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2004).

about the exhibition
The full moon this fall, All night long I have paced around the pond, Otto-Knapp's Artpace exhibition, consists of a series of fourteen monochromatic prints that encapsulate the artist's investigation of the different stages of a choreographed movement. The elegance of the figure's silhouettes and poses is equaled by the rich texture of powdered metallic silver dust and ink that covers the surface of her relief etchings. Seven intaglio prints explore the lines that make up a pose and seven relief etchings emphasize surface as well as line. The relief etchings' reflective quality makes it difficult to read the prints in their entirety: varying angles of light and the movement of the viewer produce the perception of a figure in constant flux. The artist's previous formal experiments with watercolor on canvas share a similar concern for the fluidity of the image.

In her paintings, Otto-Knapp layers and dissolves gouache and watercolor on the canvas. The nature of these types of pigments denies the kind of permanence inherent to acrylic or oil paint. The artist exploits this by removing and adding layers of translucent washes to her compositions. The resulting images have an overall flatness yet appear to float on the surface of the picture plane. Curator Kitty Scott elaborates on the artist's concern with the relationship between pictorial space and the human figure: "She wants to distinguish the body from space and at the same time keep them as linked and united as possible." This simultaneity of cohesion and separation is evident in her experiments with etching at Artpace.

In the series of paintings featured in the artist's recent exhibition-Silke Otto-Knapp: Present Time Exercise, currently on view at Modern Art Oxford, London, UK-she explored the tension between the movements of the dancers and the pictorial space that they occupy. For her figures, she drew on her research in early twentieth-century French and Russian choreography, and the simple, striking forms that choreographer Bronislava Nijinska and costume designer Natalia Goncharova created for Igor Stravinsky's Les Noces (1923). Otto-Knapp often distills her imagery from primary source material, such as found pictures and photocopied reproductions of ballet images.

In her etchings at Artpace, Otto-Knapp moves beyond her previous explorations of the body's form by selecting a series of movements rather than a single pose to analyze. Viewed as a whole, these fourteen prints show different stages of one gestural phrase. The different poses recall the movements of a dancer, but their lack of detail and the emphasis on form positions the artwork in a timeless space that transcends the etchings' original source. Through her combination of optical effects and interest in the universality of movement, Otto-Knapp encourages the viewer to embrace the suspended quality of perception.

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Charlie Morris

about the artist
San Antonio artist Charlie Morris creates politically charged multimedia artworks that investigate how technological objects, military tactics, and architectural spaces impact the lives of individuals. His reductionist practice often involves manufacturing monochromatic simulacra that are intended to encourage the viewer to reflect on the absence of the actual object. Within the context of post-9/11 society, we can understand Morris's work as in inquiry into the meaning of personal autonomy in a censorious world, the function of mass production, and the implications of military conflict.

Morris received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997. He has had solo exhibitions at McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2007), and REM Gallery, San Antonio, TX (2004). His work has been included in many group exhibitions, including Pleinairism, i8 Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland (2008); Miniatures- Col•lectiva de Nadal, Galerie Contrast, Barcelona, Spain (2008); Cold Cuts, Rudolph Projects/ArtScan Gallery, Houston, TX (2007); Texas Biennial 2007, Dougherty Arts Center, Austin, TX (2007); Show Offs, Unit B (Gallery), San Antonio, TX (2006); and Operations, Mulcahy Modern, Dallas, TX (2005).

about the installation
Charlie Morris's installation at Artpace is a triangulation of artworks consisting of an altered book by the Marquis de Sade, a pallet of stacked plaster casts of a military hat, and a photo/video wall showing deadly plants growing in domestic and exterior environments. The group can be read as an investigation into political persecution, the military's shaping of the individual, and our dabbling in "dangerous" objects.

In the work titled chambre, an open book and a mound of paper figures sit side-by-side within a traditional gallery vitrine. The center of each page of the book has been dexterously excavated to reveal a multilayered grotto; the adjacent pile of paper figures are tangled together, echoing the contorted poses in the book's illustrations. The "deconstructed" novel is one of four volumes of Juliette written by the Marquis de Sade. Previously censored, his sexually explicit book contains hundreds of engravings of bizarre mise-en-scènes of figures engrossed in various sexual acts. Sade, the French libertine writer, represents the quintessential artist struggling against the prudish censor; Morris becomes a different kind of censor by physically redacting the actors, cutting them from the baroque architectural settings of the engravings. This act creates a new narrative that encourages the viewer to reflect on the nature of the censor and the censored-an idea that resonates in current society where freedom of speech and privacy issues are constantly negotiated.

Morris uses a similar surface-level appeal to draw the viewer into Conium maculatum / Bloom. On one side of a wall, Morris presents a series of framed photographs taken of innocent-looking plants shown in different states of growth within a pseudo-scientific controlled setting; on the other side is a high definition surveillance-like video grid showing the same plants growing outside at different locations. The plants, viewers learn, are Conium maculatum, more commonly known as Poison Hemlock. Unlike Morris's previous sculptural work, where he merely simulated the look of bomb and methamphetamine labs, the artist for this series actually cultivated and replanted this highly toxic plant. Conium maculatum / Bloom shows the artist's emerging interest in exploring human interaction with their dangerous, even lethal, environment.

The theme of manufacture and distribution (cultivation and replanting) is also at the center of Morris's work Half to Whole. For this sculpture the artist fabricated several stark white plaster casts of an army general's hat and arranged them on a monochromatic white facsimile of a shipping pallet. At first glance the hats appear to be identical editions systematically stacked in two orderly rows, but upon closer inspection the sculptural group reads as distinct individual objects. The arrangement, subject, and form of support evoke military themes of orderliness, heroic statuary, and the movement of troops. However, the tradition of military conformity and discipline is broken by the jarring division of each hat into left and right sides that barely line up together. Half to Whole illuminates the tension between individuality and conformity. Indeed, each hat carries the story of its separate molding that may also be read as a metaphor for a soldier's experience of being shaped, whether through basic training or on the battlefield.

Alex Freeman
Interim Curatorial Assistant

Image: Anne Collier

Media Contact:
Celina Emery t 210 2124900 x323 cemery@artpace.org

Artpace is located downtown at 445 North Main Avenue, between Savings and Martin streets, San Antonio, Texas. Free parking is available at 513 North Flores Street. Artpace is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday, 12-5 PM, and by appointment. Admission is free.

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