MICHAEL JOO

October 3, 2007

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6:30pm at The New School
John Tishman Auditorium / 66 West 12th Street

Michael Joo's provocative sculptures and videos explore how science, religion, history and media inform the ways we interpret our surroundings. More interested in how we perceive than what we are looking at, Joo tests the limits of viewers' beliefs and plays on preconceived notions with artworks like Yellow, Yellower, Yellowest (1991), a sculpture consisting of three beakers filled with yellow liquid, accompanied by labels mischievously identifying their contents as the urine, respectively, of Genghis Khan, Benedict Arnold and the artist himself. Deeply interested in the cyclical nature of energy, Joo has also presented Salt Transfer Cycle (1993-95), a video in three segments. In one, the artist swims through a vast mound of MSG, the stereotypical flavor enhancer in Asian cuisine; another finds Joo walking, crawling and running on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, a stark bit of mineral-rich terrain in the country the artist was born and raised. In the third, Joo sits on a mountainside in his parents' native South Korea with his body encrusted in salt, allowing an elk to lick him. With great awareness of the connection between the physiological and the psychological, Joo has also presented perhaps his most widely known sculpture, Visible (1999-2000). A transparent plastic Buddha with visible human innards, it perhaps reminds viewers not only of essential hidden organs but also their cloaked potential as enlightened beings. Joo is presently at work on a project in Alaska, where he recently walked 400 miles along the route of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and placed a taxidermied caribou in the wild, recording its interaction with nature. He now plans to enlist native craftsmen and artists to create artworks fashioned from whale skeletons.

Phoebe Washburn
Minor In-House Brainstorm, 2006-07
Courtesy Whitney Museum at Altria, New York
Photograph by George Hirose

PHOEBE WASHBURN

October 24, 2007

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6:30pm at The New School
John Tishman Auditorium / 66 West 12th Street

"Things that get rigged up, propped up, balanced or weighted down to keep the whole process running smoothly," says sculptor Phoebe Washburn, "are often ingenious, funny, desperate, stupid or a little of all of those things." Sometimes mistaken as a renewable resources advocate for her enthusiasm for refuse, Washburn makes monumentally scaled, architectonically precocious installations out of vast amounts of materials she scavenges from the neighborhoods around her apartment and studio, as well as other locations in which her sculptures appear. Materials have included cardboard boxes from Staples, Bonita Bananas, FedEx, Frito Lay, Evian and Clorox—as well as scrap wood, sawdust (which the artist refers to as "beaches"), thumbtacks, pencils, scaffolding, bags of cement, pencil boxes, phone books, duct tape, masking tape, zillions of drywall screws and "mis-tints" rejected from Janovic. Starting with a premeditated finished product in mind but allowing the particular characteristics of her materials to inform the final result, Washburn makes work that has also been compared to such varied phenomena as a pixilated landscape, a glacier, a shantytown, a deranged demolition site, a tsunami, a whirlpool, a tornado, a 24th-century Saõ Paulo, a big-rock candy mountain on stilts and even San Francisco as seen if one approaches the city from the south. Forcing her audience to crouch, bend and otherwise adapt to sculptures to partake of various perspectives, Washburn's sculptures evidence the energy and process dedicated not just to manufacturing and discarding mass amounts of resources but repurposing them into elaborate, playful works of art.

STAN DOUGLAS

November 7, 2007

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6:30pm at The New School
John Tishman Auditorium / 66 West 12th Street

Stan Douglas creates lush photographic series and technically sophisticated film and video installations that are the foundation for nuanced political criticisms and cultural investigations. Over the course of his 25-year career, this Canadian artist has addressed such timely issues as information overload, cultural difference and the impact of technology on perception. He also has used a computer program to recombine visuals, music and dialogue in complex arrangements, resulting in lengthy and intricate narratives. Among his most ambitious and acclaimed projects are Klatsassin (2006), a "Western" that tells a murder mystery from multiple viewpoints and includes aspects of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950); Inconsolable Memories (2005), a dual 16mm projection loosely based on Thomàs Gutiérrez Alea's 1968 film Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) about the dilemmas of a bourgeois intellectual in Havana during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; and his latest project, Vidéo (2006), a video based on Samuel Beckett's Film and Orson Welles' The Trial.