Openings
See Yourself Sensing
NATALIE AND JAMES THOMPSON ART GALLERY
mar 5 – apr 5, 2013
Curated by filmmaker, writer, architect and professor of design Madeline Schwartzman, this exhibition will be a physical embodiment of works featured in her recently published book of the same name that explores the intersection between art, design, the body, science, and the senses. Fingertips, the eyes, hands, wrists, ears, skin, organs and, of course, the brain, are sites for unimaginable interventions, many of which blur the boundary between humans and machine. Artists, architects, and designers have been tracking such experimentation, injecting their work with technological means for creating new sensory experiences. This exhibition will include two- and three-dimensional work from a selection of innovative artists whose works explore this genre:
Arturo Castro + Kyle McDonald | Michael Burton + Michiko Nitta Ann Hamilton | Garnet Hertz | Golan Levin | Janaina Tschäpe
As guest curator Schwartzman comments: “Ann Hamilton grounds her work in the body and the senses, casting out into space and back into history. To expose her face to face images, she placed a pinhole camera in her mouth, pointed, and shot. Substituting the mouth for the eyes yielded a trifecta of portraiture: an intimate self-portrait of the artist, an embodied portrait of the viewer, and a hazy cropped image of the subject. Golan Levin’s Eyecode complements Hamilton’s work by capturing a video clip of a viewer’s eyes between the duration of two blinks, and then juxtaposing them with all prior and subsequent observers in an uncanny array of reflected observation. Garnet Hertz, creating the work Videodome specifically for this exhibition, uses a series of helmet-mounted miniature video cameras to make a 360-degree non-digital portrait of the viewer, broadcast large-scale to twenty-four analog monitors. In so doing, he creates a multi-dimensional installation with a feedback loop of light and movement. Arturo Castro and Kyle McDonald’s Remask allows adjacent viewers to “swap” faces: you take the face of your friend and your friend becomes you. Such instantaneous “losing face” undermines and questions what it means to be “you.” Janaina Tschäpe’s playful photographs and drawings deploy the female body and explore sensation on a more dream-like level, with polymorphous landscapes, bulbous forms, and organic parts undergoing apparent mitosis. And, finally, Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta cast into the future with startling speculations on human evolution and co-evolution. Among their individual and collaborative works are a series that speculates upon the human body as a farming site for pharmaceutical companies, a series that promotes the mutual benefits of humans, microbes and bacteria, and a proposal for algae-enhanced humans who photosynthesize for food.”
In conjunction with the opening of this exhibition, Ms. Schwartzman will provide an illustrated lecture describing the field as a whole as well as the particular choices she has made for this SJSU exhibition. This will take place from 5 – 6 pm Art #133 on March 5, and this presentation and the following opening reception are free and open to the public.
Jo Farb Hernández, Professor and Director
Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery
