December 11, 2008 - January 24, 2009

Justin Colt Beckman • Matt Browning • Heide Hinrichs • Caleb Larsen • Vesna Pavlovic • Michael Simi

Co-Curated by Scott Lawrimore and Yoko Ott

“M.G. Turner, R.H. Gardner, and R.V. O’Neill define a patch as a component within a landscape that differs in appearance or structure from its surroundings. The matrix of a landscape, the general dominant cover type within which patches exist, is characterized by high connectivity.…The nature of how patches are distributed across a landscape will affect resource availability within the system, the survival of the organisms living within those patches, and the rate at which new invasions (or patches) occur. (Pickett and White)”

-Kristen A. Ross, Utilizing Patch Dynamics to Characterize Biological Invasions

Patch Dynamics: Six New Invasions to the Field brings together six artists working in the northwest who are either new to the field of art or new to the area that show distinct promise in adding to the region’s artistic diversity and future vitality.

Patch Dynamics, a concept in the field of landscape ecology theory, explains that patches are the individual, distinct, and disparate parts comprising the whole of a landscape. Furthermore it recognizes the health of that landscape is paradoxically dependent on the introduction of new species to its environment and also threatened by them. The notion that the overall design of a landscape may end up radically changing—or in some instances being completely replaced—by the emergence of new patches became the premise for conceiving this exhibition and a metaphor for six artists just starting to take root in the artistic landscape of Seattle.

The exhibition was reverse engineered. Patch Dynamics: Six New Invasions to the Field is not a group show of a specific topic or theme with selected artwork from an artist’s oeuvre to support it.  Rather, it is an exposition of six artists of merit not yet on everyone’s radar—with distinct paths of inquiry—intended to supplement the recent survey exhibition Century 21: Dealer’s Choice and its conspicuous lack of artists under the age of 35. Patch Dynamics recognizes the work of “newcomers” whose art and ideas are demonstrative of the times and environment we live in and have the potential of shaping the cultural landscape of our region. The work is to be viewed as a series of six concurrent solo exhibitions within one space—prequel surveys intended to impart a core understanding to the artists’ individual projects. Presented within the gallery as six patches, viewers are allowed to engage them singly, or identify intersecting narratives, complimentary ideas, and relationships between the artists’ work for themselves. 

Coinciding with exhibition is a series of social activities co-curated with the artists. It endeavors to engage a broader audience in discourse and shed light on the artists’ art, ideas, and influences. Activities will include: artist talks, exhibition tours with arts professionals, film screenings, and more. A complete schedule of events will be announced shortly.

THE MAIN SPACE

The Main Space is turned over to the work of Matt Browning, Heide Hinrichs and Michael Simi.

Matt Browning

Matt Browning’s work critiques and celebrates the male experience, offering a general statement on boyhood adolescence and an intimate, often autobiographical perspective of the male psyche. Working with at-hand materials and using sporting goods as media, his work probes the intersections between personal/shared experience, masculine ritual, and conquest/competition. Being witness to and participating in a lifetime of masculine escapades has provided the conceptual foundation for his art practice.

Men seek to carve out identity and acceptance by climbing the tallest tree in youth, establishing athletic prowess in adolescence, and winning reckless drinking competitions in young adulthood. Browning finds beauty and absurdity in this behavior, and his work speaks to both.

Browning maintains a connection to the equipment used in a given sport or activity as much as he connects with the experience itself. By integrating ephemera from baseball and skateboarding into his work, his work confronts the complexities of tradition, identity, and material expectation.

Browning also considers how climbing a backyard oak tree in Maryland differs from climbing pine trees in the forests of the Kitsap Peninsula; how skateboarding sun-soaked urban arroyos in Los Angeles differs from hiding from the rain and skateboarding parking garages in Seattle; and how spring-breaking with friends in tropical Cancun differs from getting wasted with buddies out at gloomy La Push. He recognizes a person's environment affects their behavior, no matter how common that behavior may be at its core. As a native of this region it is equally important to Browning to address both universal male experiences and what male identity looks like specifically in the Northwest.

Upon entering the gallery’s Main Space viewers are immediately encountered with He Who Dies With the Most, a new work by Browning. The sculpture, a totemic structure made of used shoes, worn and all donated by Browning’s skater friends, exemplifies the ideas behind the artist’s work. Utilizing the historical and cultural significance a totem pole has in Northwest Native American tradition, He Who Dies With the Most tells a story and symbolizes of the qualities, experiences and pride of a clan—in this instance a Seattle skate crew. The work also comments on the belief that a man’s collection of material things contributes to their status in society. Here the amassed collection of shoes, with their unique styles and brands, represents a collective social standing within the Northwest skater community. 

O.G. R.I.P. and Twice Conquered, two sculptures also rooted in skate culture, exhibit Browning’s interests in the aspects of art making that address an experience’s materiality. In the meditative work O.G. R.I.P., cast-off grip tape once skinning skateboards is removed and layered upon one another forming a wall-hung sculpture that takes advantage of the formal properties of its material. Exposed markings left behind from the truck bolts once piercing the tape are visible traces revealing the architectural elements of a skateboard. In a nod to Gordon Matta-Clark’s elegantly layered and cut paper works, O.G. R.I.P’s title takes on many meanings: “Original Gangster, RIP,” “Original Gordon, RIP,” “Original Gordon Rip-Off,” or “Original Grip,” as in grip-tape.

Knocking skate-stoppers off ledges, cutting the kinks off handrails, or putting Bondo in the cracks of sidewalks are all ways skaters alter a given area to make it function in their best interests. Twice Conquered is a point of entry into looking at the practice of manipulating the urban environment to better suit one’s needs. Form follows function in the minimal sculpture. A pink flesh-like “Bondo band-aid” spans a disruptive crack in the near pristine surface of a concrete slab revealing the artist’s hand. The thoughtfully applied Bondo is demonstrative of the skaters’ dedication, who are willing to assume the role of “guerilla mason” in order to mend cracks in urban spaces the most worthy of reclaiming. Browning associates these little tweaks to our surroundings in the city to those of a builder or farmer who manipulates a piece of nature for personal—or public—gain. In this way Twice Conquered conquers anew, restoring small areas of the urban landscape back to an ideal state for skaters.

The Dance, a new photographic work, documents Browning and two of his roommates shotgunning beers in their backyard. Titled as such because of its striking similarity to the composition of figures in Matisse’s Dance paintings, Browning’s comparison is a witty interpretation of the work. The reckless shotgunning—a method of drinking a beer in record time—mirrors the air of hedonism in Matisse’s paintings, and the young men’s experience cum ceremonial dance further extend Browning’s interest in masculine ritual and tribal identity.

These same lines of inquiry are found in The Things We Did? It Wasn’t So Much The Thing, As It Was That We Did ‘Em. Here, like in He Who Dies With The Most, Browning takes cue from cultural tribes native to this region and creates a utilitarian artwork. The dual-purpose device’s function is to puncture holes in the side of beer cans, essentially becoming a convenience tool for shotgunning. Created from weathered cedar fence boards, the sculpture references the backyard and camping trip locales in the Northwest where this behavior typically takes place. The irony of The Things We Did? It Wasn’t So Much The Thing, As It Was That We Did ‘Em, as suggested by its title, is that a utilitarian tool of this nature is virtually unnecessary. Its scale makes its mobility cumbersome and counter to the impromptu nature of shotgunning where people can pull their keys out of their pocket wherever they are, poke a hole in their beer can and drink—or shotgun—it in less than half a minute. The Things We Did? therefore becomes a utilitarian relic, and homage to an adolescent activity that while not very important, is a signifier of communal exchange.

The idea for Trophy Trophy came while Browning was taking apart baseballs and began thinking about all of the skin and flesh that went into covering them. The pelts from skinned animals have long been used as a way of immortalizing a hunting accomplishment. Similarly, baseballs also serve in this capacity as trophies for a game. Players are awarded the ball with which they hit their Xth number home run or pitched their Xth number strikeout. Trophy Trophy combines two trophies from two separate male activities into one by breaking the skins of baseballs into squares and building them back up into a digitized animal pelt form.  Its final figuration references a symbol that spans generations of masculine ritual from animal pelts to hieroglyphics to characters from early Atari-era video games.

Matt Browning was born in 1984 in Redmond, WA. He received his BFA from the University of Washington in 2007. His work has been included in group shows at SOIL Gallery and Crawl Space, an artist-run gallery of which he is a member. Browning had his first solo exhibition, Home Field Advantage, at Crawl Space Gallery in September of 2008. Most recently, his work was selected to be on exhibit at Vatican Gallery, Seattle’s smallest exhibition space housed in a drawer. Vatican Gallery is a new project started by OKOK Gallery.

Heide Hinrichs

“Hinrich’s fragile objects and bodies placed within space hardly endure words and sentences. They invite us to perceive them in silence in order to dig into the logic of their internal thoughts.”

-Philippe Van Cauteren – from a letter in Heide Hinrichs:  I Am Still in the Woods 

Born in Germany and now working and living in Seattle, Heide Hinrichs’ work is humble. Her unassuming sculpture and environments lovingly fabricated from base materials and common objects transcend their materiality. For Hinrichs the slightest gesture or the most modest of transformations speak untold volumes.  Easy to dismiss, her work takes time and pays dividends for the patient and persistent viewer, as discarded and leftover materials become tiny worlds and complicated universes. Hinrichs’ first instinct is collecting—acquiring the cast off materials that will become the work. Second, she transfers these materials towards a new identity. She misuses them. Texture, color, volume and shapes play a significant role. Her interest is to create an imaginary topography, a whole poetic environment. She understands the objects as tools that enable her to alter space. This process is a balancing process of transformation and arrangement that might lead to subtle shifts of view and different perceptions. Hinrichs doesn’t employ elaborate or glossy techniques, rather she fully believes in the quality of the gesture and the suggestive character of the environments she creates.     

In Table 2, (part of The Expected Obedience Of Your Thoughts series), on top of a plain table lay a number of enlarged teeth and characters of the alphabet in abstracted three-dimensional forms - turned around their vertical axis (middle or right/left). This work is about the shift from the spoken to the written word. Hinrichs concretizes the volume of words, envisioning their sounds and how teeth inside of the mouth, like language itself, are the tools that shape these normally invisible forms. 

Shift is an octagon that has gone slack.  It’s own materiality won’t allow it to maintain its shape.  It has its origin in the desire to move something out of it's center forcing the viewer to consider the blurred space, the space where it moved from its original form to its present condition.

In Lotus, the never-ending surface of a ball is taken apart, converted into a new endlessness that is romantic.

There is a story by Borges “Blue Tigers” in which a man is hunting for a rare blue tiger in India. He finds a mark on the ground that further feeds his imagination. Then there is another hint, or he believes that he just caught a glimpse of it in the jungle's thicket. In the end he leaves the place without success, but his mind got upset by a juxtapositional find. Trolling Vanguard is not a tiger; it is a puma that is about to disappear again.

Reversed U and Islands are intimate microcosmic landscapes that explore the significance of what should be universally simple ideas to grasp and live by—interconnectedness and interdependence. Making manifest the organizational strategy of Patch Dynamics, these little worlds show the different ways we can connect socially, politically or in matters of subjectivity.

BIOGRAPHY

Heide Hinrichs was born in 1976 in Oldenburg, Germany. She received a B.A. in Education of Art and Philosophy from the University of Kassel in 2000; her M.A. in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden in 2002; studied with Ulrike Grossarth at Meisterschulerstudium, HfBK Dresden from 2002-2004; and was a participant of the H.I.SK. in Antwerp, Belgium from 2005-2006. She has held one-person exhibitions throughout Europe including: Rossek/Stahl, Frankfurt; Schauspielhaus, Dresden; Robert-Sterl-Haus, Struppen; Kunstverein, Ahlen; and Gallery onetwenty, Gent. She has taken part in important group exhibitions in Oldenburg, Dresden Paris, Hamburg, Munich, Antwerp, Warsaw, Edinburgh, was most recently featured in Manifesta 7, Principle Hope in Rovereto, Italy, and will be included in the upcoming show Insightout at the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin. In 2009, Hinrichs will be the fourth artist exhibiting in Seattle Art Museum’s NEXT program, its new contemporary art series featuring local, national and international emerging artists.  This is the artist’s first exhibition in Seattle since moving here in 2006.

Michael Simi

…. terror is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave

in human fortunes and unites us with its secret cause and pity is the feeling

which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us

with the human sufferer.

….the feeling which is proper to comic art is the

feeling of joy.  –James Joyce

Michael Simi’s work is about anonymous fear deployed with comic means to pitiful though joyful ends. Simi is an instinctual twenty-something Existentialist whose white bread upbringing informs his art. The five works presented in Patch Dynamics, although seemingly disparate on first blush, all have a strong foundation in identity politics and ask big existential questions with meager means. If Kierkegaard grew up in a trailer park and made art with materials easily acquired from Wal-Mart rather than writing philosophical tracts, his work might have looked something like Simi’s. Simi describes his work as “diffusion layers” between personal experience and the obfuscating nature of language and images. The leap from a young artist’s self-evaluation and semi-autobiographical work to universal significance and relevance is an easy one to make thanks to the accessibility of his aesthetic and media choices. Although touching upon many historical genres of art, Simi’s everyday, contemporary materials breath new life and bring strange gravitas to these tried and true art forms.

Take for example three works, all from 2007, included in the exhibition:  Stabbed Treat; Sex Offenders From My Hometown; and Helmet. Stabbed Treat hangs on the wall like a painting. It’s square and spare like any good Minimalist work. It’s composed; colorful and full of energy like an Expressionist canvas. Instead of oil or acrylic and canvas though, Simi’s materials are Rice Crispy cereal and plastic knives. The benign violence of the work taps into notions about Lucio Fontana’s work conflated with childhood fear and predation as well as good old-fashioned teenage angst and kill-your-idols mentality. A similar tone is struck with Sex Offenders From My Hometown. Here, the outdated genre of needlepoint meets the D.I.Y., mall-art of the iron-on transfer.  Simi identified that he went to high school with nine of the over forty county-registered sex offenders and identified six that live in his hometown of Newberry, a small city in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The romantic, nostalgist in Simi thought how better to commemorate those facts than with throw pillows? Helmet is a brooding piece, or perhaps a piece about brooding. The intense ruminations depicted in Rodin’s Thinker or Durer’s Melancholia, or even Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull, meet their low-brow match in this cast resin skull protector filled with Glade® Plug-ins® air deodorizers. 

The large-scale sculpture and audio installation, Nightmoves, rounds out and grounds the exhibition of Simi’s work. Twelve double figures, attached face-to-face, dressed all-alike in hoodies, jeans and Converses, hang in a large circle.  Each set of heads is outfitted with a speaker that plays an infinite overlapping arrangement of time-staggered audio loops. The starting point for the audio tracks came from Bob Seger’s song “Nightmoves,” especially the two lines:  “….working on mysteries without any clues…” and “….we were just young and restless and bored….” The appearance of these haunting, menacingly dark figures hearken back to Joyce’s definitions of “pity” and “terror,” exposing the artist’s personal angst, while the audio provides the “joyful” comic punch line that these are just kids doing what kids do. Joyce again sums it up best:  “…we are all animals. I also am an animal.”

BIOGRAPHY

Michael Simi was born in 1980 in Newberry, Michigan. He received his B.F.A. from Northern Michigan University, Marquette in 2004; and his M.F.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2007. While in school he participated in numerous shows in Michigan, Indiana, Oregon, and Washington. Since graduating he has shown at Helm Gallery, Tacoma; SOIL Gallery, Seattle (in collaboration with Fred Muram); and has an upcoming show, Daydrunk, at Gallery 4Culture in 2009. This is his first commercial gallery exhibition.

WHITE CUBE

Justin Colt Beckman

Featured in the White Cube are three photographs, a single-channel video, and a dazzling sculpture by Justin Colt Beckman. Investigating the characteristics of small town life, Beckman’s work interrogates the urban/rural dichotomy and its associated stereotypes, while simultaneously questioning the term’s relevance in the face of the technological revolution, urban expansion and the rise of globalization. Utilizing a variety of visual media taken from both low and high traditions in art Beckman’s convergent methods of art making further exposes this cultural intermixing. Throughout Beckman’s work exists the conflation of the “real and virtual,” “here and there,” “high and low” and “you and me,” that underscores the psychology of the urban/rural dichotomy. The result is his take on a “countrypolitan” lifestyle. 

Originally from Los Angeles, Beckman currently resides in Thorp, a rural town with a population of approximately 300 an hour and a half due east of Seattle. This physical and psychogeographic shift in environment heavily informs the artist’s work. Beckman has been able to fully engage in the ruralness surrounding him and as a self-described, “city boy with country boy tendencies,” his creation of hillbilly tableaus affords him a shortcut around the exclusionary, generational requirements typically associated with rural activities. Instead of learning the skill of hunting through a inherited or passing on of tradition, Beckman’s skills were acquired through hours of game play on a Play Station 2®. Desiring that prized trophy buck, Beckman was able to claim that with a few simple mouse clicks on Ebay®, followed by a quick and painless PayPal® transaction.

Black Bear is an example of a city boy’s attempt to “bag” a trophy animal. Recognizing his lack of experience and knowledge of bear hunting, Black Bear is Beckman’s alternative representation of a successful hunt. Inspired by Damian Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull, For The Love of God, as well as Hollywood’s idea of the “Rhinestone Cowboy,” Black Bear is the “bright lights, big city” version of “a land populated by hard-drinking and lazy backwoodsmen, who were prone to violence and thrilled by the rugged sport of bear hunting.” (Harkins, Anthony, Hillbilly: A cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 68) Beckman envisions his Black Bear as a mystical creature that, if you should happen upon in the middle of the woods, would grant you three wishes. Tellingly, Beckman’s first wish? “To know how to get out of the woods.”

In Automatic, viewers encounter a painterly field of greenish-yellow. Birds chirp pleasantly, ignorant to the disturbing sound of distant gunfire. As the paint begins to be removed in reverse splattered stages, a horizon slowly comes into view. Eventually what was a shield for the viewer completely vanishes, revealing the artist, standing, dog by his side, in campestral seclusion…pointing a gun at you. The title, Automatic, refers not only to the artist’s preferred weapon of choice (albeit a benign version), but also to the style of painting being essentially negated over the duration of the video.

Inspired by questions of identity, stereotypes, and role-playing, the Sportsman series is part of a larger body of work in which the artist uses digital imaging to cut and paste his face onto found images. In it we see Beckman’s conflation of the “real and virtual” and “us and them” often used in his work, and the archetype of the “countrypolitan” man emerge. By appropriating the activities and lifestyles of others, Beckman vicariously explores a range of personalities and characters. In doing so, he quickly co-ops a wide-range of experiences that would normally require years of training, specific genealogical lineage, or a DNA configuration different from his own. In the digital Self-Portraits, Beckman is portrayed as a great hunter, as a true mountain-man who is not only self-sufficient, but who is also a symbol for the great frontiersman and American individualism—a real man’s man.

Justin Colt Beckman is a founding member and board president for PUNCH Gallery in Seattle, WA. Beckman received a BFA with an emphasis in photography and film/video from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Since December 2001, he has been living and working in central Washington and currently resides in the unincorporated town of Thorp.

Receiving his MFA in Sculpture from Central Washington University in 2008, Beckman has exhibited work both locally and nationally including Art Share in Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Art in Ft. Lauderdale, FL; G.A.S.P. in Boston, MA; Tacoma Art Museum’s 8th Northwest Biennial and most recently at the Sguardi Sonori traveling festival of media and time-based art in Italy, and Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ.

HALLWAY GALLERY AND BLACK BOX THEATRE

Caleb Larsen

In his Info-Aesthetics manifesto Lev Manovich, states that information aesthetics “scans contemporary culture to detect emerging aesthetics and computer-based cultural forms specific to information society. Its method is a systematic comparison of our own period with the beginning of the 20th century when modernist artists created new aesthetics, new forms, new representational techniques, and new symbols of industrial society.” Utilizing logic-based systems, Caleb Larsen traverses digital and physical spaces, identifying the existing divides and intersections between them. Akin to an explorer, Larsen writes programs and open-source codes, mining the data of familiar territories and presents the information in a way that leads to a rediscovery or reorientation of our relationship to it. Through distortion, simplification, and manipulation Larsen creates systems that critique systems revealing their social, political and psychological properties.

With the mind of an engineer and the heart of a poet, Larsen’s work is an amalgamation of exacting science, earnest sensitivity and incisive wit. Semiotics and mapping are key threads in his work.  It is through language that otherwise indecipherable thoughts and images are given meaning. Mapping enables us to gain a birds-eye perspective on the terra incognita of Larsen’s geographical and conceptual territories. His work leverages the effects of language and mapping to translate life, media, and culture into transmedia experiences.

In the first moments of Boiling Point viewers are lulled by the otherworldly space and sound of a meditative waterscape. It’s a moving image resonate of Vija Celmins’ Comet painting. The camera’s gaze is tightly fixed on the bottom of a silvery pot, drawing you into an interior space, yet at the same time, has a distancing effect. Slowly calm gives way to feelings of anticipation, then claustrophobia, agitation…dread. As the video builds intensity develops creating a sense of anxiety, shortness of breath, and in the end an unsettling feeling of relief. As a poignant metaphor for the creative act, or the strain of an uncomfortable exchange, Boiling Point is a test of patience and strength.

In Climate Controlled Environment #1, a Peltier cooler is used to frost a small square of metal installed seamlessly into a wall. The tiny thermoelectric cooler is fighting the climate-controlled environment of the traditional exhibition space. Upending a trend of “giganticism” in the art market today, Climate Controlled Environment #1 is barely there—stripped down to the fundamental qualities necessary for a work to critique the mores of display and viewing. Only a slight disruption of the wall’s surface and an absurdly modest temperature modification of a small area require the most perceptive of viewers to pay attention. The one-and-a-half inch by one-and-a-half inch square of white frost within in the white field of a gallery wall is easily overlooked, yet, once discovered, is intimately personal. In deference to exhibition practice, Climate Controlled Environment #1 quietly and admirably struggles to make its presence known.

In Larsen’s Burn Out series, the macho aggression of Aaron Young’s motorcycle burnout take on action painting is toned down and neutered. Larsen’s moped burnouts created on gessoed panels are endearingly pathetic, individualizing. Like Rauschenberg and Cage’s Automobile Tire Print, the panels’ marred surface leaves behind elegant traces evoking the personal desires we have to leave our mark. Burn Outs are painterly testaments to giving it your all with what you have.

On view in the Black Box Theatre is The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. It is comprised of every letter of every word of every literary work of William Shakespeare translated into an alphabet of colored squares, thereby reducing his entire oeuvre into a single, formless colorfield. In a newly defined language of Larsen’s own creation, the artist transcribes each of the nearly five million letters into a Color Field painting. Its flesh-like, pinkish tone is happenstance, a result of the multitude of colored points vibrating off and perceptually blending into one another. The fact this one bland image possesses all of the drama of Shakespeare’s entire career is paradoxically awe-inspiring yet absent of the veneration deserved by the writer. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is a new form of representation in the digital age, testifying to the radical evolution of language in the codified age of information technology. 

Like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Epic of Gilgamesh Being Read By A Computer continues Larsen’s interest in using language as a media to interrogate given systems. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest written work of fiction, and represents a moment when oral culture moved to a written culture. In this version read by a computer in digital speech, a direct tablet translation of the original work is taken from a digital source. Through a digitally mediated form, the story is given back its orality.

BIOGRAPHY

Caleb Larsen was born in 1979 in a small cabin without a toilet in a remote northern region of Michigan, USA. He has swam in the Arctic Ocean, played Wiffle Ball with Paul Auster, hitch-hiked through the Yukon, assembled bowling pins, worked as an email marketer, made over ten thousand cups of coffee, and built vintage racing mopeds.

Currently Larsen is an MFA candidate in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2002 he attended the Yale Norfolk summer residency program, and received his BFA in Painting in 2003 from Western Michigan University. In 2008 he, mounted a solo show at Philadelphia’s Esther M Klein gallery, showed in the Recoded exhibition in Aberdeen Scotland, and received the prestigious Award of Excellence from RISD. In addition, Larsen’s recent work has been exhibited at Ars Combinatoria in Orlando, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Detroit International Video Festival, Flux Factory in New York, 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle, and Tjaden Gallery at Cornell University. The artist lives and works in Seattle and Rhode Island.

BACK ROOM

Vesna Pavlovic

Vesna Pavlovic is perhaps the most seasoned of all the artists in the exhibition with a long and notable list of accomplishments and exhibitions in Europe and the eastern U.S., although it was just two years ago that she received her MFA from Columbia University and moved to Seattle. As a photographer steeped in a strong documentary background, Pavlovic keenly subverts this detached flaneur attitude about merely capturing compelling images by interrogating them within rigorous conceptual frameworks. These frameworks develop as anthropological studies analyzing different cultures and their visual representations through particular social, political and historical phenomena. Issues of taste, desire and expectation; the indistinction of public and private; and the friction between performance and spectatorship, each set in (or removed from) their usual contexts, are prevailing themes in her work.  In doing so, Pavlovic confronts photographic representation itself by attempting to expose the layers constituting the image. In her most recent work, and critical to her installation in Patch Dynamics, Pavlovic has extended the above inquiries to the conditions and contexts of viewing her own work.

Pavlovic’s patch is the Back Room of Lawrimore Project, the “social space” of the gallery where built-in furniture and a fireplace play against a reinsertion of the viewer into the urban landscape due to a large picture window framing the view outside. Drawn to this area precisely because of its implied public/private and inside/outside dichotomies, selections from Pavlovic’s numerous bodies of work will be complimented by a site-specific intervention to the space itself.

Can you take a color photograph of pure color and achieve something that even approaches the original? Only if you take a “bad” photograph, according to Pavlovic. Appearances are deceiving in Six Color Transparencies, a group of solid color photographs representing Pavlovic's investigation of the photograph as object.  Decidedly her most minimal work, here the surface and physical properties of the photographs are key.  Pavlovic achieves her saturated tones by purposefully blurring the image, effectively erasing what grain might show up in print while negating photography’s usual intent of objectivity.  It is a strange inversion as the final photographs are truer representations of the actual subject (color) than can be achieved with the most expert of techniques. For the installation at Lawrimore Project, Pavlovic will use a gallery window as a filter, and photo-grey painted gallery wall exposing the friction between the medium of representation, black and white and color photography, objecthood and the conditions of viewing. Six Color Transparencies appeared previously as a part of the Pavlovic's Display, Desire installation at G Fine Art in Washington, D.C., an exhibition exploring American model homes.

Collection/Kolekcija is an exploration of the various cultural and political forces that shaped two distinct art collections: the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and the Federal Palace at Belgrade (government of ex-Yugoslavia), both built in the 1960s. The work offers an investigation and a view into both collections as well as the buildings, which hosted them.  

“Both buildings function as symbols of the political systems they extolled. The idea of changing the interior [of Chase Manhattan] conforms to the strategy of capitalist entrepreneurship, which must constantly evolve in order to satisfy its inherent need for mobility and development. On the other hand, the Palace of Federation is now an almost-abandoned building with uncertain prospects… Yet both interiors in Pavlovic’s photographs are empty, deserted. We recognize them as similar not only in their original ambition, but also in the atmosphere they generate. They look like vacant stage sets for some play that was once performed there, or sites of modern archaeology that bring us back to a time when progressive modernism was to become a language that transcended ideological boundaries.”(quote from an essay by B. Dimitrijevic)

In French, nuit américaine (“American night”) is a cinematographic process for shooting night scenes during daytime, and refers to Francois Truffaut's film, "La Nuit Americaine", a.k.a.,"Day for Night" (1973). Pavlovic’s site-specific intervention is to place a blue filter on the gallery’s large picture window, offering a night vision of an industrial landscape while simultaneously affecting the perception of her own work on display.

Sculpture Gardens (2002-2003) depicts the gardens of the Vlachs, a minority group in Eastern Serbia, and their eclectic “guest-worker” taste.  Sculpture Gardens is an inter-disciplinary project, initiated in the summer of 2002, and finalized as a series of photographs presenting the private Vlach gardens as visual representations of their status and wealth. These gardens have significant meaning in the cultural identity of the Vlach. As working-class people, they have appropriated the elements of high aristocratic culture from European society and translated it into their own cultural codes. Gardens are also observed here as specific collections of artifacts.

“What Pavlovic photographs is far from the usual… instead of ‘authentic’ jugs, pots, and carpets we are confronted with the world of pseudo-classical balustrades, garden dwarfs and bambies and corny stucco-decoration. … It is the ethnography of being nowhere, but also of leaving traces behind, second-hand artifacts of un-exotic and bastardized culture.” (quote from Attentive Observations, situated motivations and Displaced Inquiries, by B. Dimitrijevic)

Three found photographs from Selce at the Adriatic coast become a starting point for the Idyll on the Beach project. The beach scenes taken in the early 1930s depict people looking at the camera as the photographer takes a shot. Tracing positions of people portrayed from one image to the next, Pavlovic explores the relationship taking place between the photographer and its subject. Using a “blow-up” photography technique, the work explores ideas of authorship and appropriation, with a sentiment about photographic image reemerging through time. A third image of a girl observing a scene from above is added as a suggestion of an author’s alter ego.

BIOGRAPHY

Vesna Pavlovic was born in 1970 in Kladovo, Serbia. She received a B.F.A. in Cinematography from the University of Belgrade in 2002; and her M.F.A. from Columbia University, New York in 2007 (receiving the Agnes Martin Scholarship). Solo exhibitions include:  Hotels, Museum of History of Yugoslavia (2002); An Idyll on the Beach, Artget Gallery, Belgrade (2002); Watching 01, Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2003); Watching the Sacramento Kings, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento (2005); Display, Desire, G Fine Art, Washington DC (2007); and numerous one-person exhibitions with Fusebox, Washington DC (2002-2006). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in Belgrade, Atlanta, Graz, Barcelona, Bergen, Washington DC, Berlin, Thessalonica, Utrecht, London, Helsinki, Salzburg, and Zurich.  Most notably, her work was included in Rear View Mirror, an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge with work by Tacita Dean, Omar Fast, Matthew Buckingham, Sam Durant, Joachim Koester and others in 2004; Decollecting, Frac Dunquerque, idem + arts, Maubeuge, France, Ost Lockt at Roemer Apotheke Galerie, Zurich, and the 49th October Salon in Belgrade in 2008. Her work is in the permanent collections of: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardens, Washington DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; and Museum of Applied Arts, Belgrade.