Second Nature
dal 25/2/2004 al 3/4/2004
Segnalato da
25/2/2004
Second Nature
Cristinerose Gallery, New York
Jill Baroff's first solo exhibition. Second Nature straddles the divide between a romantic attachment to the immediacy of nature and a fascination with the revelations of technology. As patterns of place, all the works in the exhibition relate; sky and water being the two elements subjected to re-interpretation. Jill Baroff's abstract landscapes chronicle the changes that gather around a fixed point through various manipulations of data and materials.
Opening: Thursday February 26 from 6 to 8pmCristinerose | Josee Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present Second Nature, Jill Baroff's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Her work was recently included in The Invisible Thread... at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, and will be shown in March at The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and in September in Ad Infinitum: Serial Imagery in 20th Century Drawing at the Davis Museum, Wellesley College. Jill Baroff lives in New York. Her work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States and Japan where she spends part of the year.
Second Nature straddles the divide between a romantic attachment to the immediacy of nature and a fascination with the revelations of technology. As patterns of place, all the works in the exhibition relate; sky and water being the two elements subjected to re-interpretation. Jill Baroff's abstract landscapes chronicle the changes that gather around a fixed point through various manipulations of data and materials. A wall installation of Japanese gampi and a video capturing the incoming tide at Rockaway beach coexist with a group of large Tide Drawings and a series of Gray Skies (Epson 2200) digital prints.
Japanese gampi, a translucent natural fiber is a material essential to Jill Baroff. A sheet of gampi, applied directly to the wall near a window, borrows light from the outside world, holding it suspended within its boundary. The material itself is the medium for the work. Drawing Rockaway, a five-minute single channel video, fixes the reality of the incoming tide with the drawn edge of each successive wave, documented as a stack of marks on the screen that resist being swept away. Like the gampi, video acts as a capturing device, making light visible.
In her Tide Drawings, Jill Baroff meticulously registers the repercussions of waves and turns them into micrographs. The tides' patterns unfold as a result of algorithms based on the movement of the seas and planets. Predictive tide tables are first downloaded from the Internet; the information is then traced by hand as a grid with blue or black ink on a square of gampi. The stretching and mounting of the translucent fiber loosens the grid structure. A maze of variations of texture, scratches and imperceptible changes of color animates the drawings with infinite vibrations.
The Gray Skies digital prints originated as a single photograph taken on a gray day outside the town of Bentheim, in northern Germany. First printed using an Epson 4-color printer, this landscape was then scanned at 10,000%. The resulting image, a psychedelic festival of reds, blues and yellows, is a brilliant CMYK dot pattern: the printer driver's interpretation of gray. They are conceptual cousins of the Tide Drawings; they both clash and match.
Second nature describes a process that has been practiced for so long it seems innate, and, as a consequence, invisible. By allowing things to show themselves with a remarkable economy of means, Jill Baroff's work questions one's position in relationship to the complexity of systems, structures and convention.
Opening: Thursday, February 26, 6 to 8 PM
Cristinerose|Josee Bienvenu Gallery
529 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011
tel 212 206 0297 fax 212 206 8494