14/9/2006
Snake River
Redcat, Los Angeles
Charles Gaines and Edgar Arceneaux. Expanding upon film montage and installation, the show connects two distinctive performing arts venues - The Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles and the Brucknerhaus in Linz, Austria - with the 700-mile-long Snake River.
Charles Gaines and Edgar Arceneaux
Redcat opens its fourth season with new works by artists Charles Gaines and Edgar
Arceneaux. Expanding upon film montage and installation, Snake River connects two
distinctive performing arts venues—The Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles and the
Brucknerhaus in Linz, Austria—with the 700-mile-long Snake River. The river, which
runs from Wyoming to Oregon and Idaho, feeds more than twenty tributary basins
across the United States and serves as a literal and metaphoric analogy between
geographic or geologic sites and architectural or performative spaces, an
interaction of nature and its representation.
For their first collaboration, Gaines and Arceneaux have also enlisted Sean Griffin
whose original composition is featured in the video installation. From the Snake
River to Linz and back home to Los Angeles, the artists traverse the sensorial and
intellectual space that links the physical path of a primordial formation with the
sentient abstractions of music. The music becomes a tributary of the architecture
and, at the same time, the architecture becomes the instrument of the musical
ensemble.
Charles Gaines received a bachelor’s degree from Jersey City State College and a MFA
from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Gaines has exhibited widely including
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago;
Kunsthalle Basel; Stadtgalerie, Stuttgart; and the Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York. Edgar Arceneaux received his MFA from CalArts and his BFA from Art Center,
Pasadena. Arceneaux has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Gallery 400,
Chicago; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;
and Kunst Werke, Berlin. Gaines is based in Los Angeles and has taught at CalArts
for over fifteen years. Arceneaux was mentored by Gaines when a graduate student at
CalArts. The exhibition is REDCAT’s effort to foster the evolution of their ongoing
dialogue from student and teacher to that of colleagues.
In conjunction with the exhibition, REDCAT will publish a boxed, two-volume,
bilingual (English and German) catalogue with an interview with the artists by
Lentos Kunstmuseum director Stella Rollig, and texts by Charles Gaines, Edgar
Arceneaux, and REDCAT assistant curator Clara Kim. The catalogue will include
installation views of both installations and will be available in November.
Snake River is a collaboration with the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz and is made possible
by the Nimoy Foundation; Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation; The Dean's Council
Interdisciplinary Arts Grant, CalArts; V. Joy Simmons; The Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts; and Susanne Vielmetter Los
Angeles Projects. Additional support provided by Campari. The Lentos Kunstmuseum
presentation and the two-volume publication are funded in part by the EU
Commission’s Culture 2000.
Opening: Friday, September 15, 2006
Redcat
631 West 2nd Street (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) - Los Angeles
Gallery hours: noon to 6 pm or curtain, closed Mondays
Admission to the gallery is always free