Radar Redux.com is expanding the traditional concept of journalism, to cover a wide array of Baltimore Arts and Culture.
What brought the women of Losing Yourself in the 21st Century, a new exhibition at Maryland Art Place, together in both real time and cyberspace? The exhibit is a complete exploration of new media art from the curation itself to the art on display; the twelve artists were selected through a unique blogging process. Rather than lose yourself in the meta-cyber tangle that this project represents, take a look at the artwork. There you will find some excellent new works by a talented group of up and coming female artists working in the United Sates.
An important experiential part of an exhibit is the first and last view of it. On entering Maryland Art Place’s three-room gallery, one is greeted cheerfully by No Place, a multi-media installation by Saya Woolfalk. The installation consists of video, textile, and sculptural work that completely fill the space with the artist’s utopian vision of the future. Though the altar-like sculpture in the center of the room is slightly underwhelming, Woolfalk’s work is cohesive conceptually and offers the viewer a lively entrance into the show. It provides a preview into the variety of mediums and reoccurring themes that makes Losing Yourself in the 21st Century a comprehensive and well-organized exhibit. Echoes of the struggle between reality and virtual reality, perceived identity and self-evaluation, and what it means to be a woman of the 21st century could be found throughout the space.
In the second room, along the left wall, I was one is immediately drawn to Stacia Yeapanis’ Everybody Hurts. In this work, Yeapanis has created —a series of medium sized embroidered portraits depicting television screen captures, or still photographs taken from the television screen. By using a slow manual process to appropriate an image from such a fast-paced, time-based medium , the artist invites her audience to question their own investment in these characters. One piece, Buffy Summers #2, shows a surprised Sara Michelle Geller in the popular series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with the phrase “ it seams like the birds shouldn’t be singing anymore but they are” embroidered in small black lettering beneath it. This work demonstrates more than a simple re-appropriation of TV imagery; Yeapanis has re-claimed the tradition female past-time of embroidery in order to explore the role of these images in the formation of our 21st century female identity.
A lot of the artwork in this exhibit portrays the search for personal growth and self-realization through both constructive and destructive means. Two chairs with plastic seat covers sat in front of a TV showing new work from well-known video and performance artist Shana Moulton. The video, part of Moulton’s Whispering Pines series, is an interesting, dreamlike portrayal of woman’s search for self-improvement made in an approachably low-tech format. The seats and the kitschy plastic decorations placed around the TV lunge the viewer directly into the satirical, lonely, and intriguingly mundane world of Moulton’s alter ego, Cynthia. Though the video itself did does not disappoint, I found that the low quality of the sound was distracting.
With the exception of Yeapanis’s embroidery and Milana Braslavsky’s distorted-yet-figurative photographs, artists who are engaged with digital process, video and performance art dominate the show. In some cases, such as Amber Hawk Swanson’s To Have, To Hold, To Violate, the video serves as a mere documentation of a greater art performance. The seven-minute video shows Swanson, accompanied by life-sized sex doll modeled after her, at a variety of events, ranging from a wedding reception to an adult industry convention. The subject of this piece becomes the other people that the artist and her doll encounter throughout the video; the viewer retains a spectator’s distance as they consider their own role in the sexual- objectification of women.
Conversely, Noelle Mason’s Lan Party or National Take your Daughter to Work Day is a multi-media installation with video components. Mason directly engages the viewer with her work. Drawn to it at first though the shock of seeing a sniper rifle set up in an art gallery, the viewer is then asked to sit behind the gun which points at a small, ornately framed video screen on the far wall. Mason’s work proves to be a politically charged, aesthetically interesting and complex view of participation and spectatorship.
Ultimately, it is this relationship between artist and spectator, projected truth and inner truth, them and you that this exhibit is calling into question. From Woolfalk’s installation on, visitors are asked to see themselves in the work. The introduction of 21st century media into the gallery space helps solidify the importance of our surroundings in shaping an individual identity. The artists of Losing Yourself in the 21st Century have captured what it means to be a person living and working in this age of virtual reproduction.
Maryland Art Place
Losing Yourself in the 21st Century
Curated by: Cathy Byrd, Jillian Hernandez, and Susan Richmond
February 4th- March 27th, 2010
Tags: Amber Hawk Swanson, Cathy Byrd, Jillian Hernandez, Maryland Art Place, Milana Braslavsky, Noelle Mason, Saya Woolfalk, Shana Moulton, Stacia Yeapanis, Susan Richmond
Filed Under: Feature Sights
[...] original here: Radar Redux » The Art of Losing Yourself in the 21st Century Hebrew University archaeologist discovers Jerusalem city wall from …1977 Buick Century [...]
February 22, 2010 9:27 pmSocial comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by xxxnetklix: Industry News: The Art of Losing Yourself in the 21st Century – Radar Redux: Baltimore Arts and Culture (blog) http://bit.ly/djPKVN…
February 23, 2010 10:36 am[...] I searched for artists whose work embodied our definition of ersatz. After reviewing her work for RR several months back, I contacted Stacia Yeapanis about the project. We ultimately chose an [...]
June 3, 2010 11:24 am