1:100

Infinitely Small Things public expedition

UPDATE: this event has been CANCELLED due the wet and stormy weather in NYC today. It will be rescheduled for later this month or early August. Check back here for the new date & time.
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Glowlab is pleased to announce a special event taking place this Friday as part of our 1:100 exhibition at DCKT Contemporary:

WHAT: Public Expedition to find infinitely small things

WHERE: Meet at DCKT Contemporary - 537 W. 24th Street between 10th & 11th Avenues

WHEN: This Friday, July 23rd @ 7PM. The expedition will last 1-2 hours.

The Analysis of Infinitely Small Things, a research project of new media artist kanarinka, is dedicated to the discovery, creation, collection, construction and documentation of all of the infinitely small things in the world, past, present and future.

The Analysis of Infinitely Small Things involves an infinite series of maps, guidebooks, instructions, and scripts that guide public expeditions, performative interventions and collaborative investigations from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world.

photos from 1:100 opening

Glowlab's summer group exhibition, 1:100, opened at DCKT Contemporary in New York on Thursday, July 01. Here are a few photos from the opening...

information

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

1:100
DCKT Contemporary
summer group exhibition

curated by Glowlab

July 01 - August 27 . 2004
Opening Reception: July 01, 6-8 pm

With: Corin Hewitt, Shih-Chieh Huang, Paul Ramirez Jonas, kanarinka, Mario M. Muller, ON/Megumi Akiyoshi, Christina Ray, Swoon, Alex Villar, Lee Walton

DCKT Contemporary is pleased to present 1:100, curated by Glowlab, in which 1 foot of interior space is equivalent to 100 feet of the city. By enlarging the gallery floor plan and placing it over a map of the surrounding neighborhood, Glowlab transforms the gallery space into a three-dimensional map of the area. According to this hybrid map: Chelsea Waterside Park is located at the gallery’s main entrance, the High Line elevated railway travels north through Gallery 1, and, in Gallery 2, Madison Square Garden is located near the east wall and the General Post Office is in the center of the room. Each artist has selected a section of the gallery / neighborhood and created new work in response to his or her chosen location.

By focusing the viewer’s awareness on the surrounding urban landscape, each artist creates a link between the interior space of the gallery and the exterior space of the city. Several artists work with locally gathered materials. Shih-Chieh Huang creates a sculptural installation of plastic containers, relay circuits and microcontrollers, all found or purchased at dollar stores, pet shops and hardware stores in the neighborhood. Corin Hewitt uses the dirt swept from a local street corner to cast his sculpture of a discarded plastic trash bag. Embedded in the dirt and resin are discarded materials and refuse, turning the idea of the receptacle inside out. Paul Ramirez Jonas scours the neighborhood for stray bricks, bringing them into the gallery and building a section of brick wall. Although dividing or supporting nothing in particular, the unused bricks are given an optimistic second life as work of art. Mario M. Muller’s ink on paper works correspond to the four cardinal points and are placed accordingly within the gallery. These “urban canyons” offer long views of the light and architecture extending beyond the confines of the neighborhood map.

Other artists’ works invite direct interaction with the streets immediately surrounding the gallery. kanarinka provides the means to investigate “infinitely small things” in the area and record them as part of a larger work. In addition to a documentary installation, she offers two group expeditions during the course of the show. Street artist Swoon adds peep-holes throughout the neighborhood, through which one sees fictitious scenes that could be occurring behind that very wall. These miniature images are reproduced as three-dimensional works in the gallery. Christina Ray offers a guide to navigating the city by the patterns and locations of its brightly colored corner news-boxes. A printed guide will be available in the gallery and distributed in neighborhood news-boxes throughout the summer, and a walking tour using the guide will take place on the final day of the exhibition. Ray also presents a series of small drawings based on her walks.

Attention to street fixtures and other objects that help and hinder our passage through the city is also evident in a number of performance works. Alex Villar’s depiction of an absurd way of using a curbside mailbox disrupts the solemnity of the James A Farley Station (8th Avenue between 32nd & 33rd Streets) that appears as the background for his intervention. ON/Megumi Akiyoshi, dressed in her signature “ON Gallery” attire, wheels a gumball machine throughout the neighborhood as a mobile gallery, allowing customers to purchase the small works of art inside to wear while walking through the Chelsea art district. The gumball machine and video documentation of her performance will be shown in the gallery. Lee Walton’s performance, documented as a video work, is a series of scripted actions selected and enacted on a specific street corner in combinations chosen by the other artists in the exhibition. As an extension of this piece, Walton offers a real time performative piece in which he will dribble a basketball up and down 36th Street every morning of the exhibition.

About the Curator: Glowlab is a Brooklyn-based arts lab dedicated to the production, documentation and presentation of multi-media work in psychogeography and public-space arts. They produce events and lectures, organize collaborative projects and exhibitions, and maintain an online lab at www.glowlab.com. Psychogeography is an open and highly experimental discipline concerned with the ways in which the geographic environment affects emotions and behavior. Approaches to psychogeography vary, and include artistic, political, philosophical and scientific work in fields ranging from archaeology and cartography to programming, performance and street art. Glowlab aims to bring together these diverse perspectives and engage in dialogue on the methods and practice of psychogeography.

Additional Events:

Friday, July 23, 7PM, and Friday, August 20, 7PM: Infinitely Small Things expeditions with kanarinka (meet outside DCKT Contemporary).

Friday, August 27, 7PM: NewsBoxWalk with Glowlab (meet outside DCKT Contemporary).

July 01 – August 27, 7-8AM: Performance by Lee Walton, 36th Street between 7th and 9th Avenues.

The exhibition will be on view at DCKT Contemporary, 537 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea. Hours are 10am to 5pm, Monday - Friday; tel: 212.741.9955

For further information, please visit http://glowlab.blogs.com/1_100/ or contact Dennis Christie or Ken Tyburski at the gallery.

credits:
maps by Red Maps
exhibition concept, curation and website by Glowlab

invitation

Corin Hewitt

85 Union Street, mixed-media installation, 2004

project
For the 1:100 exhibition, Corin Hewitt uses the dirt swept from a local street corner to cast his sculpture of a discarded plastic trash bag. Embedded in the dirt and resin are discarded materials and refuse, turning the idea of the receptacle inside out.

artist's statement
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.
Lewis Carroll

I use personal history to explore the relationship between private and public memory. I am interested in the ways in which we, as individuals, create monuments for ourselves out of culturally shared experience. For this reason, my work incorporates historical and cultural icons (Skylab, weatherman Willard Scott) that are recognizable and familiar. These icons, however, are put to a very personal and specific use.

In my previous two projects, I incorporated subjects that loom large in my memory as well as our shared cultural history. The two-part project, Here’s What’s Happening in Your Part of the World (As We Speak), 2001-3, featured a larger-than-life cast marble sculpture of weatherman Willard Scott. Scott’s forecasts defined the daily environment throughout my childhood. In the urban version of the work, the sculpture was located in a 30-foot shaft way of a 19th-century townhouse in Manhattan. The sculpture was then moved to a silo in Vermont where it was on view to the public for a period of a year.

For my most recent project, 85 Union Street, I joined three different environments. The exterior of the piece is a cast earth 1/12-scale model of Skylab, the first US manned space station, which plummeted back to earth in 1979. I remember watching the uncontrolled fall of Skylab in my grandmother’s house. The interior is a 1/12 scale-replica of the rooms my grandmother lived in her entire life. The work is exhibited crashed into a forest floor.

The outer layer of the piece is made of earth taken from underneath my childhood home in Vermont. The interior rooms, visible through a long crack in the cast dirt exterior, include exact reproductions of the furnishings and clutter in the house precisely as my grandmother left them on the day she died.

Shih-Chieh Huang

project
For the exhibition, Huang will conduct a scientific experiment involving materials gathered within the 1:100 location; on streets, sidewalks, underground, stores, restaurants and buildings. The goal is to bring these materials to life without creating a catastrophic effect that disturbs the delicate ecological balance within the map site. His research will take the form of a sculputural installation in the gallery.

profile
Born in Taiwan, 1975; based in New York; MFA from School of Visual Arts, 2001 Skowhegan, 2001, Manhattan Community Arts Fund Recipient, 2003, and New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, 2002. Huang merges artificial materials, air, water and electronics to create experimental organic living
environments/ sculptures. He disassembles everyday electronic appliances, devices and reassemble selected parts with dissected household plastic materials. The result of these combinations form a kinetic cause and effect system that interacts with the viewer. Work has been shown abroad at the places such as Museum of Contemporary Art Madrid, Valladolid, Gijon, Malaga, Burgos, MOCA Taipei, Kunsthanus Dresden Art Museum, and Gallery Mouri in Japan. Past US exhibitions include shows at Queens Museum, New Museum, “Looking In”, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, PS-122, Exit Art, and Asian American Arts Council.

Paul Ramirez Jonas

Ghost of Progress, single-channel DVD, 2002

project
For the 1:100 exhibition, Paul Ramirez Jonas scours the neighborhood for stray bricks, bringing them into the gallery and building a section of brick wall. Although dividing or supporting nothing in particular, the unused bricks are given an optimistic second life as work of art.

profile
Paul Ramirez Jonas is an artist living and working in New York City. He has a survey show up at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England traveling later this July to Cornerhouse, Manchester, England. He has had solo shows at LFL Gallery, NY, New York, Roger Bjørkholmen Galleri, Stockholm, Sweden, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Postmasters Gallery, New York, Studio Guenzani, Milan, Italy, White Cube, London, England, Jack Tilton Gallery (Project Room), New York, White Columns, New York and Artists Space (Underground Project Room), New York. He has participated in an extensive number of group shows both nationally and abroad. Among them: Cultural Territories International, Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany in 2003; Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More... On Collecting, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2002; Globe>Miami

kanarinka

project
"The Analysis of Infinitely Small Things" is a collaborative research project designed to examine and analyze the realm of the Infinitely Small. What things are so Infinitely Small that we do not notice them around us? Cracks, dust, and microbes? A candy wrapper, a curb, a shadow on a building? The sun and stars?

The seminal text in the field of the Infinitely Small is a Calculus text called "L'Analyse des Infiniment Petits" (1696) by the Marquis de l'Hôpital. In order to begin a modern investigation of the Infinitely Small, kanarinka has transformed this text into a 200-foot-long scrolling guidebook bound in saran wrap with English instructions derived from the original French text.

Using the scrolling, saran-wrap guidebook in addition to magnifying glasses, microscopes, and other field research tools, members of public expeditions scour the everyday environment for Infinitely Small Things. Participants carefully document and sample each Infinitely Small Thing using specially prepared research forms. Each research sample is later carefully digitized and published to this website in the catalog of samples. The website, www.infinitelysmallthings.net, contains a detailed analysis of the collected research samples.

For 1:100, kanarinka will lead a series of public expeditions to find infinitely small things in the area around the DCKT Contemporary.

profile
kanarinka is a new media artist and curator. She is the co-founder of the non-profit collective iKatun and the Head of Technology for the WIDE World Research Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Mario Muller

project
Mario M. Muller’s ink on paper works correspond to the four cardinal points and are placed accordingly within the gallery. These “urban canyons” offer long views of the light and architecture extending beyond the confines of the neighborhood map.

profile
Mario M. Muller is an artist, writer, curator and native New Yorker. He has had over a dozen solo exhibitions, the latest of which was titled Lexicon and held at DCKT Contemporary in New York. He has been the recipient of numerous public and private commissions and his work has been collected internationally.

ON/Megumi Akiyoshi

project
"YOU Gallery"

YOU Gallery is a site-specific installation and performance focusing on a vending machine which offers buyers the chance to create their own miniature, wearable artworks and become "human galleries." The vending machine, installed in public space, sells capsules containing a kit which allows buyer/participants to make paintings on tiny, gold-framed canvases. Included is a sticker which allows participants to name their galleries and wear this sign and the mini-canvas as they walk through the gallery-filled Chelsea neighborhood operating as their own personal galleries. A painting by ON Akiyoshi is also included, which participants can wear/exhibit as a part of their collection.

This project is an extension of ON's ongoing performance as "ON Gallery," a piece in which she acts as a human gallery, traveling and exhibiting contemporary painting worn on the body. As the owner of the gallery, she operates as a walking "organic white cube." Usually, people go to galleries expecting to see art -- ON has reversed this situation that so that the [human] gallery approaches people directly in unexpected public environments.

For the 1:100 exhibition, ON/Megumi Akiyoshi, dressed in her signature “ON Gallery” attire, wheels a gumball machine throughout the neighborhood as a mobile gallery. She allows customers to purchase the small works of art inside to wear while walking through the Chelsea art district. The gumball machine and video documentation of her performance will be shown in the gallery.

profile
Lives & works in New York; 2002 MFA from School of Visual Arts; 1997 BFA from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

2004 Gallery Ra-shin-ban, Tokyo, Japan;
2004 Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA;
2004 The Contemporary Art Museum of Burgos, Castilla, Spain;
2003 PP's MuMu at Kunsthaus Dresden, Dresden, Germany;
2003 Gallery 456, New York, NY;
2003 Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial, Niigata, Japan;
2003 Artspace, New Haven, CT;
2002 Star 67, Brooklyn, NY;
2000 Sakima Museum, Okinawa, Japan, Sponsor: Toyota Car Corporation, etc;
1999 Solo: Gareria Grafica, Tokyo, Japan;
1998 Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo; Kyoto Museum, Kyoto;
Aichi Museum, Aichi and Fukuoka Museum, Fukuoka, Japan.