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26/4/2004

Glass Movie

The Italian Academy at Columbia University, New York

Film di vetro.
The initial minutes from an endless movie by Alessandra Tesi

New York, NY - April 13, 2004 – Italian artist Alessandra Tesi, winner of the prestigious Premio New York, a prize for contemporary artists from Italy co-sponsored by Columbia University's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the New York Italian Cultural Institute, will present a continuous screening of ' the initial minutes from an endless movie ' entitled ' Glass Movie / Film di vetro ' in the theater of the Italian Academy from 6 :00 p.m. to 8 :00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 27, 2004.

Alessandra Tesi was born in Bologna in 1969, where she graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti. In 1995 she participated in seminars at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris. She lives and works in Paris.

Her first pieces were monochrome photographic works of interiors, hotel rooms and psychiatric hospital structures seen as empty 'sets,' as if staged by reality. She has participated in international photographic exhibitions such as Prospect '96 at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and in 1999 in Insight Out-Landscape and Interior in Contemporary Photography, at the Kunstraum Innsbruck, Kunsthaus Hamburg and Kunsthaus Basel.

Tesi's interest in the capacity of spaces to condition behavior led her to expand her work to installation scale, using various means such as video and environmental painting. Between 1997 and 1998 she created special projects for exhibitions at the Musée du Papier Peint, Rixheim, France; at Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, Italy; at the Blickle Foundation, Kraichtal, Germany; at the Institut d'Art Contemporain/Nouveau Musée in Villeurbanne, France; and at the Institute of Visual Arts in Milwaukee. In 1999 she created an environmental work at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Rivoli-Torino, currently on view as a permanent installation in the Collection.

Tesi's video works are projected onto customized light-reflective backgrounds which she creates, changing the consistency of the projected image.

In 1999 Tesi began making projects with the collaboration of urban special intervention and emergency squads, as she continued her interest in reality and in those special structures that aim to keep it safe and controlled.

In 1999 Tesi made a work in collaboration with Paris firefighters. She presented it for the first time at the Galleria Massimo Minini in Brescia, where she projected the video onto a screen devised specifically for this purpose, made of thousands of small glass spheres. The work was also exhibited in Paris at the ARC Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2000.

In 2001 she was invited to the 49th Venice Biennale, where she presented her first work with the Paris firefighters and a new work made in collaboration with firefighting airplanes and helicopters. The latter piece used the same technique of projecting onto glass micro-spheres, and on this occasion Tesi patented this special screen. At the Venice Biennale she presented her projections in daylight, developing her ideas about ghostly presences experienced as transparent images.

In 2002 Tesi further developed the idea of projection onto glass surfaces for the opening of the Macro Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. She presented a new abstract work shot in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris and projected it onto a screen made of thousands of opaque glass spheres suspended from the ceiling.

Meanwhile Tesi spent a year with detectives of the Brigade Criminelle (Crime Squad) in Paris, who are called upon to solve only the most difficult homicide cases, where it is necessary to delve far back into a missing past, in order to fill an absence in the present. She followed the investigators on crime scene investigations, and she is making a work out of this experience, which is still in progress. Her work on crime scenes has the opposite aim of the investigators'; instead of seeking to reconstruct a story, she focuses on the stillness of the 'broken' scene. In 2002 she received the Fellowship from the Friends and Supporters of Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, where she presented a preview of this project in 2003.

The 'Glass Movie' will be of an infinite length; Tesi will continue to add scenes over time, a succession of 'paintings' made of light. This work represents further experimentation with the projection of transparent images onto a painted background. It is a movie about the moment in which images get lost. It is about unstable moments in reality -- omens, fictions, denials -- when images become evanescent and transparent presences faded by light and painted by the passage of a thought.

For this project Tesi has begun a collaboration with The Lamont- Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. She is working with polar scientist Bruno Tremblay to devise her storyboard. She asked Tremblay to elaborate on the idea of disappearance in his own work and to draw trajectories representing an absence in reality, using polar stereographic projection to record the hesitations of a landscape destined to vanish. The process of disappearance becomes a circular pattern representing this ongoing compensation for loss, an endlessly rotating form. The movie stages the moment, through superimpositions, opaque depths, shining reflections, and violent color shadows, in which it becomes impossible to hold an image.

A live improvisational piano score, performed by pianist/composer Gordon Beeferman, will accompany the screening.

AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY'S ITALIAN ACADEMY CONTINUOUS SCREENING AND RECEPTION APRIL 27, 2004, 6-8 PM

'Glass Movie / Film di vetro' has been possible by the support of Epson.

Call Rick Whitaker at the Italian Academy, 212 854 1623, for more information or to schedule interviews with Alessandra Tesi.

The Italian Academy at Columbia University is located at 1161 Amsterdam Avenue between 116 and 118 Streets.

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