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As seen in issue 56 of Closer Magazine, published on 2009-03-27 in the "NationalArt" section.
What's On
The good, the less good and the beautiful
By: Aquaman
“We are here all doing more or less the same thing, and we all kind of scream out our individuality. This appears chaotic, but it really isn't.”
Person of Interest: Sue Stevens
Characteristics: Keen intelligence, modest fervor, strong concern for social and political issues, deep curiosity about form and perception. This 29-year-old WPB native has been known to wear vintage Minutemen t-shirt to punk rock shows.
Strategies: Appropriation, intervention, subversion
Media: Video, light, photomontage, found objects
Education: BFA, Florida Atlantic U.
Closer: Enumerate is an installation of about a gazillion LED alarm clocks going off in a darkened room. A tangle of electronic underbrush, it seemed to be about order/control/chaos.
SS: Each clock is a unique mechanism, has a sort of personality, like people; the involved configuration of flashes and tones creates disorientation. I mean to say, we all carry out the same basic functions, we are here all doing more or less the same thing, and we all kind of scream out our individuality. This appears chaotic, but it really isn't... this was an installation for Showtel in 2008 at Hotel Biba. When some viewers spent significant time in the space, patterns emerged from the alarms, and ironically, some viewers said the space became strangely soothing.
Closer: Taciturn consists of a totally innocuous, videotaped image of a corner of a room, projected onto…a totally innocuous corner of a room. It's weirdly disorienting, raising questions about representation and perception.
SS: It's a visual representation of the corner above my bed. I always paint the walls in my bedroom (wherever I move) the same color; it's called Nervy Hue. It makes me feel at home, but it looks different depending on the lighting of the room and, in the corner of the ceiling over my bed, it looks like two different colors. So I got to thinking, how can these two colors represent the same color? How many different colors can this one color look? Of course it's the light's influence that makes the color look different, and the light is like our perception, it influences how we see formal things.
Closer: In Degenerative Portrait, you've made a video loop of the progressive obliteration of an image of yourself. Eighty iterations of the image are copied: a copy of a copy of a copy eighty times. It has a Zen-like feeling, with questions about art and information.
SS: I was in front of a photocopy machine working on some collages for weeks, and duplicates are never as clear as originals. I started experimenting. I wanted to see how long it would take for an image to completely disappear, to analyze the progression. I started associating what was happening visually, with something else. The image started to look like an image disappearing into the "snow" on TV, so I scanned the images and compiled them in a video. Because the process cleared my mind like it cleared away the image, I ended up using an image of myself, on a TV produced in 1979, the year I was born.
Closer: For Homeland: Tribute to Florida and National Security, you used color footage from federal government surveillance cameras to make a time-lapse video loop of a Florida oceanfront setting. It includes evidence of a criminal act of yours—defacing government property. What do you see in that, aesthetically and in terms of social/political concerns? And what is the point of the criminal intervention?
SS: Conceptually, it's about breaking the law in front of the world and no one noticing, and these cameras now being everywhere and people not being bothered by it anymore. It is also about finding beauty even in a very invasive and violating technology.
Sue Stevens work can be seen at Native Offerings II at Pine Jog Environmental Education Center open until its closing reception, March 27, 2009, 6:30-8pm. And at Armory Art Center, WPB, May 22nd through June 3rd—armoryart.org
www.suestevensart.com
Found Art
Most impressive show of the year so far: The Schmidt Gallery’s “Designing Intelligence,” an ambitious, adventurous enterprise expressing the personal mythologies of a team of artists under the direction of New York artists Michael Zansky and D. Dominick Lombardi, and curator AdrienneRose Gionta. The art—meditations on history, science and society, in media of every sort--spills across the gallery’s walls along a ten-foot high scroll that runs the 120-foot length of the building’s entranceway, then explodes around and up the walls of an interior space the size and height of a small basketball arena. That’s not to mention the ongoing series of accompanying lectures, readings, seminars and symposia on religion, science and meaning.
Designing Intelligence. Through April 4.
fau.edu/galleries
Most thoughtful but maybe a tad too..safe show this year so far: The Norton’s pairing, comparison and contrast of work by Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams. Can’t argue with the beyond blue chip integrity of these two—as all-American as a box of corn flakes. Lacks the pizazz of the Big N’s previous show, the fabulous “A Tradition Redefined,” which brought us the freshness of contemporary Chinese art. Quality stuff, though, to be sure.
Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities. Through May 3.
www.norton.org
On the mercantile tip that was January's PB III arts fair—eighty, count them, eighty galleries!--there's no question that plenty of top flight contemporary artists were represented: You couldn't spit without sliming a Warhol. Still, the show had nothing to shake you up. Good to see the inclusion of three Dreyfoos School students, though: Caitlin Clingman, Ben Mendelewicz and Vinh Pham show real promise. With all the big money that swings through this burg (what’s left of it post-Madoff), young local artists need the chance to wet their beaks.
www.palmbeach3.com
Bookmark this: Showtel, Palm Beach County's annual installation art extravaganza, is back for its seventh, um, installment. Be there or be...you know. www.showtel.org
Other good stuff around WPB/Lake Worth:
- Armory Art Center. Master Artists and Truth Seekers, April 10-17, Artists-in-Residence, April 24-May 16.
armoryart.org
- Gavlak Gallery. Hunter Reynolds and Christopher Milne. Weird pop domesticity by the latter, lipstick traces by the former. Through April 4. www.gavlakprojects.com
- Mary Woerner Fine Arts. Terre Rybovich and Mary Segal. Large-scale charcoal by the former, pattern and decoration by the latter. Through March 28. www.marywoernerfinearts.com
- Margot Stein Gallery. Robert Goodnough: important, second generation abstract expressionist. Through March 27. www.margotsteingallery.com
- Present Global Art Gallery. Paul Aho. Paintings and monoprints; salt water Taaffe. Through April 4. www.presentglobalartgallery.com
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