You hold it in your mind all the time.

An exhibition of experimental work about physicality and perception.
August 11 – September 30, 2011

Art at 12
12 Farnsworth Sreet
Boston MA 02210
www.fortpointarts.org
Click to view slideshow.

Art At 12
12 Farnsworth St
Boston, MA

Join us for an artists talk about this exhibition of experimental work about physicality and perception. Artists: Michele Jaquis, Heidi Kayser, Jeremy J. Quinn, Sarah Rushford, Marguerite White, Tom Wojciechowski.

The exhibition includes projected and monitor based video, sculpture, drawing and photography that takes an experimental, scientific, or analytic approach to the investigation of the mysterious nature of somatic knowledge.

www.fortpointarts.org for more info

We would be so happy to see you at the opening on August 11 or the artist talk on Sept 24. Or stop in during gallery hours of course!

(Please note the change in the artist talk date from the printed postcard, which says Saturday Sept 15 )

You hold it in your mind all the time.
An exhibition of experimental work about physicality and perception.

August 11 – September 30, 2011

Michele Jaquis
Heidi Kayser
Jeremy J. Quinn
Sarah Rushford
Marguerite White
Tom Wojciechowski

Reception: Thursday August 11, 2011 5:00-8:00 pm
Artists Talk/Closing Reception: Saturday September 24 2:00pm

Art at 12
12 Farnsworth Sreet
Boston MA 02210
www.fortpointarts.org
617 423 1100

Art at 12 Gallery Hours
Mon-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 11am-4pm, Sunday by chance

Art at 12 Gallery presents You hold it in your mind all the time, an exhibition of multidisciplinary work by Boston artists Heidi Kayser, Sarah Rushford, Marguerite White, and Tom Wojciechowski and Los Angeles artists Michele Jaquis and Jeremy J. Quinn. The show dates are August 11 – September 30, 2011, with an opening reception on August 11th and an artist talk and closing reception on September 24th. The exhibition includes projected and monitor based video, sculpture, drawing and photography that takes an experimental, scientific, or analytic approach to the investigation of the mysterious nature of somatic knowledge.

Informed by philosphy, narrative, and neurobiology, You hold it in your mind all the time expresses and questions the folded duality of the self; the notion that the body is our infinitely personal, private selfhood, and is also a physical object in the outside world. Art theorist Gabriele Brandstetter writes of this strange doubleness “The body is a being of two leaves; from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees and touches them.”

Heidi Kayser’s sculpture Spanning the Rift is a suspension bridge made of eyeglasses which, Kayser states,“addresses the internally confounding problem of time and helps extend perception by closing the distance between looking back and looking forward.”

Michele Jaquis’s Until I Can Speak my Mind is a short film that was inspired by a recurring dream that both the artist and her twin sister have had in which the artist is chewing bubble gum which she then spits it into her hand, only to find in the next shot that the gum is still there and is getting bigger.

Jeremy Quinn’s What Holds Us Together is a video projection that depicts the Brooklyn Bridge with its middle section conspicuously missing, while the view into Manhattan (the World Trade Center towers missing) remains intact. Traffic seems to pass into and out of a charged void that separates the two sides of the bridge in this commentary on emptiness and separation.

Sarah Rushford’s Quickening is an interactive installation. Viewers reach into a box that contains a green apple and a live video feed of their hand is mixed with a recorded video of another hand touching the apple. Viewers report feeling a strange a ghostly presence as the two images mix.

Marguerite White’s Cargo Cult is a shadow theatre constructed with cut paper and simple light
projections. This surreal narrative is a reflection on the power of visual memory and the subjective nature of physical perception.

Also included are large scale abstract landscape photographs by Tom Wojciechowski, in which familiar objects—a hand, a landscape, set up a perceptual conundrum and create a space that can’t or shouldn’t exist.

You hold it in your mind all the time illuminates a diversity of multidisciplinary contemporary art practice to suggest that what may seem to be private, even mysterious somatic experiences are actually shared perceptions that might be articulated.

Common Names is a site specific sculpture made of approximately 150 beach stones wrapped in paper, and installed near a grove of sea grasses on the beach at Bumpkin Island. The paper was wet before applying to the stones, and as it dried in the sun it took on the contours and shape of the stones. After drying, I wrote a name on each rock in graphite. The names were a combination of common names, and names of people I know.

Common Names, site specific sculpture, 150 rocks, paper graphite

Common Names, site specific sculpture, 150 rocks, paper graphite

making Common Names

making Common Names

Volunteers helped wrap the rocks, and also helped to generate name ideas. The conversation about names and naming is an evokative, personal, specific one that even strangers can easily become engrossed in. Each name and each stone seems to be for one person, and for every person.

The stones with their names nestled at the edge of the sea grasses seem vulnerable and protected at once. They are visible from far away because of their color, but their shapes and contours match that of all the stones on the beach.

Common Names, site specific sculpture, 150 rocks, paper graphite

Common Names is about the strange dual sense of self that we have as human beings. On one hand we have a profound sense of individuality and private selfhood, and on the other hand, most of what we call our identity; our DNA, our bodies, our perception, our basic human needs,  almost our entire identity, is shared with every member of humanity.

Verses is an ongoing work in which prose verses that I composed are written in a stylized text, on long paper banners, and applied to the ground in areas of the landscape that are intended as views or lookout points. The banners are tilted and appear like a subtitle to the view. The two texts that I applied at two key lookout points at Bumpkin Island are the following

“Everything will be fine, your struggle, and the fighting of your mind, the pitching motions of your experience.”

“The sky will take on a yellow cast, once this cast has grown into morning, let the light of that morning fall on your hands, keep them still until the light changes.” 

Verse 1 Text banner applied to landscape

Verse 2 Text banner applied to landscape

Verses shares something with Common Names. While the texts seem to talk directly to the individual reader, they also talk to every reader. I intend for them to touch the reader’s private sense of selfhood and also their sense of self as an archetype in a broad humanity. They are like bible verses in that way, speaking to the individual and the archetypal reader at once. But unlike Bible verses they ask the reader to rely on him or herself and on this world for strength and solace, instead of asking them to look outside of themself to God or to the idea of Heaven.

The Berwick is taking over Bumpkin Island for the fifth year. Join the artist collectives Axiom Group, Traubensaft, Pop-Up, Memory Vessel and Packrat as they take residence in Boston Harbor to create:

• Massive string funnels that suck up the island’s flora and fauna
• Maps of smells, prickly things, and unfortunate occurrences.
• A humming, bustling city in just 10 square feet
• And much more.

Featured artists include: Meghann Hickson, Heidi Kayser, Georgina Lewis, Nick Marmor, Evan Smith, Liz Washburn, Alexander Reben and Sarah Rushford; Kate Jellinghaus, Sasha Stone, Haley Smith, Autumn Yu, Allison Black, Isabelle Higgins, & Rafaela Lowe; Dirk Adams, Jesse Kaminsky & Helen White; Sarah Baumert, Meg Rotzel, Jennifer Schmidt with Ben Jordan and Peter Schmitt; and Zannah Marsh & Uta Hinrichs

For a description of projects, check out the BRI website:
www.berwickinstitute.org/bri/bumpkinisland

Special event: Bring a picnic lunch on July 31 and join Artist Fellows Hannah Burr and Stephanie Chace as they present the Remembering Picnic, a participatory potluck from 12 – 4pm.
How to get to the island

The Bumpkin Island Art Encampment is FREE, but you have to get there first. The Encampment is open to the public SATURDAY, JULY 30 & SUNDAY, JULY 31. Tickets for special Saturday and Sunday Fan Pier Boston-Bumpkin $18 direct boats will SELL OUT!

Reserve tickets now at: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/187966

For a complete regular ferry schedule, visit the Boston Harbor Islands National Park website:

http://www.bostonislands.com/getting-here

For the most up-to-the-minute news, to post questions about the Encampment, and for an easy link to share with your friends (please spread the word!), RSVP to the event on Facebook:
Bumpkin Island on Facebook
Curators and Partner Organizations

The Bumpkin Island Art Encampment is curated by Megan Dickerson, Carolyn Lewenberg and Jed
Speare. The Art Encampment grew out of the Berwick Research Institute’s Special Projects
Incubator program, and is co-presented by Studio Soto, an artist performance/screening/exhibit space in Fort Point; Mobius; the Boston Harbor Island Alliance, a non-profit in support of the Boston Harbor Islands; and the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.

SEE YOU ON THE ISLAND!

Self, Somebody, Specimen, Spirit

June 11, 2011
Somerville Theater
Somerville MA
5pm (Experimental/Fine Art category)

More info: http://gloveboxfilmfestival.blogspot.com/

100/10∆8

Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI)

Rise Industries

June 1 – June 18, 2011
Reception Saturday, June 11th, 7-9pm

Institute of Cultural Inquiry 1512 S. Robertson Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90035
Riffing on the rhythms of a clock that dutifully clicks off another (unidentifiable) time zone, Rise Industries co-founders Jeremy J. Quinn and Michele Jaquis take playful measure of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry’s phantom worlds and their gravitational pulls. This collaboration is the eighth iteration of an ongoing ICI project featuring 10 curatorial visions over 100 days.

Rise Industries is:
Jeremy J. Quinn
Michele Jaquis
Sarah Rushford
Tim Devin
Nicole Jaquis
John Kim
Boris Margolin
Michael Feldman

Analogy, 2008
Shirt Cuffs, Pins, and Iron-on Text on Canvas, 13″ x 12″

Worcester Art Museum
Art All State Mentors Exhibition
May 24 -28 2011

Spectacle
2010
interactive optical instrument
mirrored lenses and fabric

Rise Industries forces aligned, (Might Morphin Power Risers are GO!). I’ve been working with Jeremy Quinn and Michel Jaquis of Rise Industries, and the group seemed like the perfect people to take on this project, at least in sketch phase. So I shot my consective days video in Boston and Jeremy and Michele shot theirs in LA. And that is what is shown below.

Two Nights- Los Angeles March 2011

Two days- Jamaica Plain Feb 28 2011, 4:11-4:21pm, March 1 2011, 4:11-4:21

We look from left to right for the inconsistencies in framing, as if trained to do so. And from this we get more information than what is contained in the frame, gestalt at work. We get iformation about what has happened in the interim, some snow has melted, and the camera has moved. Isn’t it strange how the tire tracks are tracks in the snow in the left, and negative tracks in the right? Ghost like, the day in between speaks to us when we put time together this way.

In Los Angeles, there was no snow to be melted, and the two shots are so similar that it is as if the 24 hours in between has melted instead. The inconsistencies in light, weather, and the movement of the air are highlighted instead, and even the air seems choreographed to rustle thorough the left tress, and then the right trees, as if doing a job.

In both, the passage of those twenty minutes reveals the light changing as the day approaches dusk. In the right shot in LA, dusk comes on as an intense pink glow. And it seems appropriate that this wild act of light has been recorded, because it seems to be performing on the second day because it missed the opportunity on the first.

Sound in LA is much more interesting because it was recorded outside, in Boston the camera was inside the house . In LA it is hard to distinguish the source of the sound until you have a visual cue to link it to. If there is no visual cue the sound works as a mending agent across the gulf of the two days.

To me the work is evokative, mysterious. It’s as if juxtaposing the two intervals opens a secret portal through which the very passage of time can communicate.

The Boston shots can be improved, would like to crop like LA shots (can’t do it in Final Cut Express) more to be done on this project. I’d like to see how it looks projected large or on large monitor. I’d like to try shooting with matching cameras. It is actually pretty complex if you watch all four shots at once. And at the beginning I actually intended to shoot a closeup as opposed to the more landscapey shots we did. I think we should try the closeup next. Another way I saw this was to have the right shot be live, and the left be 24 hours ago…..Mighty Morphin Power Risers, assemble! (wait I think that’s Voltron or something).