Curation

▶ “Erin Shirreff: Lake” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, March 1-June 30, 2013

Curated a small video show for Brooklyn-based artist Erin Shirreff in YBCA’s upstairs Video Lounge.

Description: Erin Shirreff, informed by her training in sculpture, explores the physical and technical aspects of image production in an effort to extend and examine the act of looking. This practice can be seen in the video Lake, which reworks a picture of Lake Okanagan in British Columbia from a 1980s tourist brochure using an intricate, multilayered process involving digital software and analog photography. Projected onto a freestanding wall, the work foregrounds the tension between a flat image and its three-dimensional physical support, providing an experience that is less cinematic, and more sculptural.

▶ “Motion” at Seventeen, London, May 17–June 23, 2012

Co-curated group exhibition with Tim Steer. Participating artists: Kari Altmann, Merce Cunningham, Harm van den Dorpel, Michael Guidetti, Oliver Laric, Mark Leckey, Sean Raspet, Emanuel Rossetti, Hito Steyerl, Artie Vierkant. [PHOTOS]

Description:The object that exists in motion spans different points, relations, and existences but always remains the same thing. Like the digital file, the bootlegged copy, the icon, or Capital, it reproduces, travels, and accelerates, constantly negotiating the different supports that enable its movement. As it occupies these different spaces and forms it is always reconstituting itself. It doesn’t have an autonomous singular existence; it is only ever activated within the network of nodes and channels of transportation.

The object in motion becomes the simultaneous obfuscation and revelation of the points that sustain it. It’s both completely transparent and completely mediated. Transparent because it ignores the different instantiations and embodiments that require it to exist across a material infrastructure and mediated because of its dependency on these multiple parts to exist at all. It flows through networked channels, forgetting any idea of a singular autonomy.

▶ “Six Films by Adam Beckett” at NOMA Gallery, San Francisco, August 2010

Film screening of Adam Beckett’s animations, co-organized with Nate Boyce and Marcella Faustini. Closing event for Nate Boyce’s solo exhibition “Parallel Series I & II”

Description: Adam Beckett emerged from the Experimental Animation program at CalArts in the 1970s. Although Beckett’s career was brief, only lasting a decade, he is renown for his unique, meticulous production process using the optical printer. This tool allowed filmmakers to rephotograph multiple strips of film into one strip, creating optical effects such as fades, dissolves, and the matting of images. The effects produced by optical print…ers were later carried over into computer graphics by digital compositing techniques, and indeed at times Beckett’s films seem remarkably prescient of this future path. Using both an optical printer and an animation stand, Beckett would gradually reposition and reshoot his intricate drawings into animated loops in order to create slight variations that guide the evolution of the figures and shapes depicted. The optical printer was also variously used to make rhythmic patterns by offsetting the frame or to re-frame sections of the drawings. Beckett’s animations appear to organically morph and mutate, often to a lively a soundtrack. This program includes the following films: Kitsch In Synch (1975), Flesh Flows (1974), Sausage City (1974), Evolution of the Red Star (1973), Heavy-Light (1973), Dear Janice (1972)

▶ “David Horvitz – Mail Nothing to the Tate Modern” at the Tate Modern, London, part of No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents, May 2010

Curated a project by artist David Horvitz for Rhizome’s space during the No Soul For Sale festival. [PHOTOS]

Description (text by David Horvitz): The 2010 No Soul For Sale festival occurred at the Tate Modern on the weekend of May 14–16. Rhizome was included among the 70 or so participants. Ceci Moss from Rhizome asked me to present a project in Rhizome’s space. The project referred to as, Mail Nothing to the Tate Modern, was conceived for this event. On May 1st Rhizome and myself announced an open-call for anyone to mail nothing (empty boxes and empty envelopes) to the Tate Modern. This announcement was last minute. There was roughly one week for people to mail in nothing. Any mailing sent with tracking would have its tracking number posted on www.mailnothing.info so that it could be followed live on the days preceding the event. During the festival all received mailings were exhibited in a pile. After the weekend, the entire project was donated to Christian Schwarm’s art collection in Stuttgart, Germany.

The website mailnothing.info located these packages (all with various points of departure and the same location of arrival) at various moments in their transit, allowing one to grasp a mental picture of the vast global infrastructure of shipping – a breathing system of objects in continuous movement. The packages sent to the Tate Modern, declared to contain “nothing” on their customs-forms as they crossed international borders, generated the data of travel with tracking technologies. This data became a trace – a trace of nothing (or, of something empty). Mail carriers claim these tracking numbers (and the data) as their legal property, which were appropriated and exhibited in this project.

▶ “NUTUREart Benefit” at ZieherSmith Gallery, New York City, October 12, 2010

Fundraiser for NUTUREart, Brooklyn non-profit arts organization. Co-curated with Dan Cameron, Jane Panetta, Krista Saunders.

▶ “The World Is Flat” at X Initiative, New York City, part of X Initiative’s No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents, June 2009

Co-curated group exhibition with Lauren Cornell and Brian Droitcour for Rhizome as part of the organization’s participation in No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents.

Description: Rhizome is pleased to present “The World Is Flat,” an exhibition to be included in X Initiative’s No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents. Featured artists and collectives include B’L'ing (Chris Moukarbel, Anne Eastman, Amy Yao), Anna Lundh, Oliver Laric, Lizzie Fitch, Alexandre Singh and David Horvitz. Two artist-centered publications, Private Circulation and Free Internet by AIDS-3D, will also be displayed. The exhibition takes the perceived flatness of culture, or the free availability and distribution of information enabled by the Internet, as its departure point. Works included celebrate this availability, such as Oliver Laric’s Touch My Body (Green Screen Version) (2008), a green screen template of Mariah Carey’s hit song which was remixed widely by YouTube users, or B’L'ing’s bootleg trading station and video RGB (2008), while others reveal paranoid fantasies that have emerged in response to increased accessibility of information, as in Anna Lundh’s Hollywood Internet (2008), a video installation that compiles footage from Hollywood films that represent the Internet as a threatening decentralized network. “The World Is Flat” includes installation, collage, sculpture, video as well as internet-based works along with a limited, reading library and a poster. Events include the HEXA_FLEXAGON_F_EVER workshop/performance by Anna Lundh on Saturday June 27th from 2-3pm on the first floor, which will walk participants through the process of hexaflexagon construction and present a short history of the hexaflexagons in the form of a corporate seminar. The workshop is an extension of the artist’s HEXA_FLEXAGON_F_EVER (2008), which investigates the interconnected people and stories surrounding the hexaflexagon, in analog and digital contexts.

▶ “No Fun: Infinite Sound and Image” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City, May 16, 2009

Film screening and performance co-organized with curator Carlos Giffoni (Part of Rhizome’s event series New Silent).

Description: In its sixth year, the No Fun Festival has emerged as one of the most unique and vital festivals for experimental music worldwide. Curated by No Fun organizer and label head Carlos Giffoni, this special screening will present moving image work by a selection of artists performing in the 2009 Festival. Jim O’Rourke and filmmaker Makino Takashi collaborate on The Seasons, a dense abstract film that fluctuates in tandem with O’Rourke’s dramatic and resonant score. Robert Beatty (of Hair Police and Three Legged Race) will provide a live soundtrack to artist Takeshi Murata’s hypnotic videos and animations. Experimental filmmaker and sound artist Sarah Lipstate (of Noveller) presents Interior Variations, a collage of 16 mm hand-painted film, black-and-white super 8mm, and found footage, which will be accompanied by a new Noveller composition titled Telecine. Dominick Fernow/Prurient will screen spins the worlds wheel again, a short film inspired by his 180-page hardcover book of collages, Rose Pillar published by Heartworm Press,which deals directly with mortality within the family structure. Sound artist/composer C. Spencer Yeh (of Burning Star Core), known for his arrangements that draw on both aural and physical experience, will premiere a new work using voice as its central component. Megan Ellis and Carlos Giffoni will also showcase a new piece, created specifically for this show, which will pair minimalist visuals with an evolving electronic sound score.

▶ “The Scale of Intervention” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City, September 5, 2008

Panel on art and urban intervention, co-organized with Christina Ray of Conflux Festival (Part of Rhizome’s event series New Silent)

Description: Co-organized by Conflux, an annual festival dedicated to psychogeography, and moderated by the founders of the celebrated street-art Web site Wooster Collective, this panel will look at possibilities for artistic disruption within urban environments. Taking its name from a film by the London-based Cutup Collective, which plays with the viewer’s perception of a street scene, the panel will feature artists whose work ranges across a variety of mediums and materials. From reformulation of billboard advertisements into powerful, politically oriented collages to the subversive reformulation of street signs, such as pedestrian crossings and bike lanes, the featured artists will demonstrate how they dislodge the customary navigation and perception of urban space.

▶ East Village Radio Storefront Screenings Series, New York City, 2008

In 2008, I invited a number of video artists to screen their work in East Village Radio’s storefront studio during my radio show, which at the time aired on Tuesday nights. The EVR studio, designed by architect Christian Wassmann, has an entirely mirrored interior, and is equipped with a projector and screen. When video is shown in the studio, the images reflect off the mirrors infinitely, in all directions, making it a unique site for video.

Viki: Cadillacs on Fire Video Installation, December 2007 and January 2008 [PHOTOS]
Joe Merrell: Fire, San Bernadino February 2008 [PHOTOS]
Mark Charles Brown: Cyber Shaman March 2008
Lydia Moyer: Mountain Loop (remix) July 2008
Alison Childs: Untitled August 2008

▶ Secret Project Robot Brooklyn, NY Bus Show, Brooklyn, May 24, 2008

John Benson transformed a city bus into a performance venue, and toured across country organizing shows in his bus. [VIDEO] I worked with John Benson, Ned Meinders, and Nick Lesley to organize a rock show in the bus outside of the venue Secret Project Robot in Brooklyn. [PHOTOS]