LIAM GILLICK

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2

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

Liam Gillick's work has been shown worldwide in venues ranging from international exhibitions to airports, and his engagement with modernity and the structures of post-industrial social organization has led him to work in a number of different media, including video, film, sculpture and text. Often addressing failed utopias and idealistic political organization, Gillick's work tends to function parallel to the world around it, at once disrupting and channeling elements of power, exchange and routine. Through the interaction between text, space and the objects of daily life, his work invites viewers to engage the built structures of spaces like the bar, the home and the workplace. Gillick is also a prolific writer, and his installations frequently operate in relationship to his rigorous text work; for example, the research project Construcción de Uno documents the history of a closed factory to which the original workers return and begin developing new modes of economic production. This theoretical text inspired a number of installations, including The View Constructed by the Factory After it Stopped Producing Cars (2005), a metal landscape made from the same type of steel used in car factories, and Four Levels of Exchange (2005), a series of four text structures installed at Frankfurt Airport.

Liam Gillick lives and works in London and New York. Born in 1964 in Aylesbury, UK, Gillick received his BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work has been included in major international museum and private collections, and his solo exhibition venues have included the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2003); Power Plant, Toronto (2003); Baltimore Museum of Art (2004); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005). His recent retrospective project "Three Perspectives and a short scenario," opened at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2008) and Kunsthalle Zürich (2008), and will travel to Kunstverein Munich and MCA Chicago in 2009. Gillick was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002 for his solo exhibition The Wood Way (2002) at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and for his outdoor installation Annlee You Proposes (2002) at Tate Britain. Recent publications include Proxemics: Selected Writing 1988-2006 (2007) and Factories in the Snow by Lilian Haberer (2007).

Dara Friedman
Still from Musical, commissioned by Public Art Fund, 2007
Courtesy of the artist

DARA FRIEDMAN

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9

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

On April 9th Dara Friedman will present her movie, Musical, a 48-minute orchestration of 60 singing performances, commissioned by Public Art Fund, that took place on the streets of Midtown Manhattan for three weeks last fall. The composition uses a split screen and wide format allowing the singers to harmonize with themselves, sing unintentional duets, or even create dissonance. By producing a musical mis en scène in our cityscape a curious inversion happens by which the choreographed elements transform the happenstance of the street into a crafted stage. Dara Friedman is best known for her film and video installations in which she uses the techniques of structuralist filmmaking to depict the lushness, ecstasy, and energy of everyday life. She often distills, syncopates, reverses, loops or otherwise alters familiar sounds and sights, drawing attention to the distinct sensory acts of hearing and seeing. Whether her work portrays a series of narrative fragments or a single evocative scene repeated over and over, Friedman heightens the emotional impact by cutting directly to the film's climax in order to, as she puts it, "get to the part you really care about."

Born in 1968 in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, Dara Friedman now lives and works in Miami. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York (2007, 2002, 2000); The Kitchen, New York (2005); The Wrong Gallery, New York (2004); Kunstmuseum, Thun, Switzerland (2002); Miami Art Museum (2001); and SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2001). Friedman attended University of Miami, School of Motion Pictures (MFA); the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London; Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; and Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York.

PAUL CHAN

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30

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

Paul Chan first gained critical attention for a series of rich and complex digital animations. One such animation, Birds...Trash...The Future (2004), was projected onto both sides of a hanging screen and collaged references from Goya to Notorious BIG to the Bible, generating an apocalyptic landscape serenaded by the songs of birds and mobile phones. Chan has also produced a number of single-channel videos, drawings, writings and, more recently, a series of digital projections. These projections, collectively called The 7 Lights (2005-07), unfold through a series of interconnected installations, which include drawings, texts and collages. 1st Light (2005), for example, begins and ends with a prismatic pool of radiant colored light projected onto the floor that tracks the course of a day from dawn to night. As the day comes, shadows both static and moving appear: a telephone pole and a street lamp, surrounded by floating shadows of familiar objects, such as phones, computers, and cars. As this tranquil scene progresses it is disrupted by images of rapidly falling human figures, then slowly fades into night. Much of Chan's work, like the Lights series, is not pointed in its politics, but instead acts like a stage on which aesthetic, philosophical and everyday symbols interact, become unhinged or are recontextualized. Chan is also well known for his political interventions—in 2002 he broke US sanctions and federal law to visit Baghdad, and in 2004 he garnered police attention for The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention, a free map distributed throughout New York to help protesters to get in or out of the way of the RNC. Most recently Chan collaborated with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and Creative Time to produce a site-specific outdoor presentation of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. On April 30th he will present The Spirit of Recession as part of the Public Art Fund's Spring Talks program.

Paul Chan lives and works in New York. His recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Serpentine Gallery, London (2007); Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2006); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005); and ICA Boston (2005); and The 7 Lights will have its US premiere at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York from April 9ÐJune 29, 2008.