MassArt Auction
April 9 2011
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
About a month ago I had one of those ideas that just arises, one that seems to be uncovered in the mind. I’m making it seem like it was some knock-your-socks-off idea, and, well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t but what it was was a clear idea; with a static video camera, shoot two matching clips during the same ten minutes of consecutive days.
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).
Current Exhibitions
I’ll be showing Carbon Studies at Axiom in this show:
Identity Element: Works from the New Axiom Group
Opening Reception: Friday, January 14th, 6-9 pm
Axiom Center For New and Experimental Media
Nicholas DiStefano, Meghann Hickson, Heidi Kayser, Georgina Lewis, Wayne Madsen, Nick Marmor, Alexander Reben, Allison Rodriguez, Sarah Rushford, Evan Smith, Yuri Stone and Elizabeth Washburn
Opening Reception: Friday, January 14th, 6-9 pm
Artists Talk: TBA
Exhibition: January 14th, – February 10th, 2011
Gallery Hours Wednesdays 6-9 pm, Thursdays 6-9 pm, Saturdays 2-5 pm,
alternative visiting hours can be arranged by appointment
Cost FREE and Open to the Public
AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media – 141 Green Street
located in the Green Street T Station on the Orange Line
I’ve been working very hard on on rebuilding my website sarahrushford.com and also making Greycatbird more visually unified with my site. I would be honored if you would browse sarahrushford.com and send me feedback either via comment or via email to sarah@sarahrushford.com. I’ll be making tweaks to improve usability. I would really appreciate your feedback!
Some of the things I added and updated are:
1. The site design
2. I switched to WordPress, and in doing so, strengthened my skills in webdesign and production.
3. Added my newest projects to all of my portfolio categories.
4. Uploaded whole video pieces and started using Vimeo.
5. Added a works in progress page
The bikerides we’ve taken in Berlin have been really remarkable and I am proud of having accomplished them! You can learn a lot about a place while pedaling through it. And, riding my bike makes me feel like I’m a kid again. As kids, my sister and I had this phrase thisafter which meant this afternoon, after school. We often cooked up the most elaborate plans forthisafter. And well, riding my bike makes me feel like it’s forever thisafter, riding through the dusk along the river. Even more fun, as an adult, one can drink beer after riding into the night. This ride pictured was yesterday. We rode to Treptower park, lovely, on the Spree, and it has paths that go through a creepy abandoned, and famous, amusement park. My feeling like a kid again could not have been complete without me falling down and skinning my knee. Not a big deal, I fell off while stopping, on a sidewalk, and out of dangerous traffic, and I am totally fine, except for a nostagic skinned knee.
Look at the tiny TV tower in the distance, we live right near it, how far we rode!
abandoned Treptower park Ferris Wheel
Thisafter
Bruce Nauman show at Hamburger Bahnhof
I learned that the German idiom Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof which means I didn’t understand anything except for the word Bahnhof, (train station) amounts to the English idiom It’s all Greek to me. There are certainly many days when pretty much the only German word I understand all day is Bahnhof.
Hamburger (…er) Bahnhof, former train station and now major contemporary art museum, was such a pleasure to see. Something happens to me when I go out to see art in places like this in Berlin, and I have to be careful because I am easily swept up in the musuemy glitz of it all, but I get a good feeling. It’s a feeling that completely goes against my more suspicious media literacy instincts. I sometimes get the feeling that the museum cares a lot about the work they’re showing, and that the artist deserves such resplendent spaces to let the work shine. I get a feeling that the work is a precious thing, and not in a negative way. I feel like an art rock star fan, and it feels good to feel this way.
But… as I saw more of the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, even though I was pleasantly overwhelmed to see so many famous contemporary works presented together, many pieces I’ve only seen in books, I was a little miffed to see so few women artists. This collection, (even though this was only some of it, its being presented over 6 years) seemed limited in social and cultural scope. I also learned more about the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection and the controversy surrounding it. His grandfather Friedrich Flick’s steel company was a major weapons supplier to the Nazi Regime. This article by interesting blogger Ivar Hagendoorn covers the first show of his collection at Hamburger Banhof, in 2004, and goes into the controversy a little more . Honestly, as a baby to Berlin and German cultural understanding, all I can think is, at least the money used for evil is now being used for good. What a simplistic thought. Ich verstehe nur bahnhof.
My disappointment at the scope of Flick’s collection was healed a bit by the Who knows tomorrow piece Waiting, by Ugandan artist Zarina Bhimji. The work is a very large projection of 35mm film representing the workings of a sisal factory in Kenya. The piercing beauty of the images illuminate the inhumane history of the industry. This is from the WKT website. “At the exhibition Who knows tomorrow, Zarina Bhimji presents her film installation Waiting (2007), for which she studied the facts of this portion of colonial history at length. Although invisible in her film, it still accompanies it like a melodic theme. Zarina Bhimji visited sisal-processing factories near Mombassa, Kenya, some of which originate from colonial times. The beauty of the architecture, the bright, hot light and the simultaneously quasi-paralyzing atmosphere together with the minute movements and the sensitive details of the colors, the walls and the utensils focus the viewer’s gaze on the beauty of the material. Introduced by the Germans to the German colonies in East Africa in the 1890s and still grown on the plantations today, the material is used for ropes, cords, sacks, and carpets.The beauty of the sisal’s texture conjures up memories of hair, lending life to the material that takes on an abstract quality. The artist’s pictures and her sounds address the viewer in a highly emotional manner. The power of Zarina Bhimji’s works is based on their sensuous and seductive imagery, inseparably tied to the tragic and melancholic sadness and burdened by history.”
Missing from photo Tamara Fitzpatrick, USA and Sunyung Im, South Korea (from left) Chris Dennis, England Carlos Gomis, Spain Elsa Medra, Spain Michaela Gleave, Australia Jay Shinn, USA Ed Whalan, Australia Eileen Cubbage, USA Anna Steele, Australia Sarah Rushford, USA
“Taktiles” ( as I have been referring to us, but really it’s only me using the term…!) enjoyed a yummy potluck dinner last night. It was really nice to relax and get to know each other a little better!
More on this image below…
After I worked on covering a large paper with graphite yesterday I decided to take photos of my hands dirty with graphite. See photo above. I didn’t know why. But when I downloaded and looked at the photos, ( which seem interesting on their own…bonus) it occurred to me to try my lens/projection setup, but to try projecting onto my graphite covered hand. Clear ideas sometimes come to me like that, it’s like I was trying to show myself that I wanted to project onto my hand, by taking photos of my hands. It’s a little creepy, and only possible to reach those ideas by messing around and experimenting. Who knows if it will even work out, but it was an arrival at a decision anyway… Although I’ve gotten some usable footage I haven’t yet come up with a decent way to attach the paper and lens so that I can shoot it and the surrounding environment. It’s not as simple as just clipping on the elements onto the tripod or camera because every shot needs much adjustment tilting and tweaking before a projected image is even apparent. I will keep working on that, but projecting right on my hand solves the problem of always adjusting the clamped or clipped on paper and lens setup, because my hand is quite adjustable. I will go out into the city and shoot this, but this was a test, and it was a sort of breakthrough! I like the implications of projection on the hand too and I like the directness, and the contrast of highly “objecty”, dirty hand with the ephemeral image.
In the parking lot of the Hamburger Banhof, the contemporary art museum, are parking spaces where you can plug in your electric car. And here one is, plugged in. Not sure why the car has that showy sign on it showing off it’s electric car self…?
I visited Olympia Stadium, the stadium where the 1936 Olympics took place, and where Leni Riefenstahl shot the documentary Olympia. During grad at the New School, I watched “The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Reifenstahl”. It’s a documentary that delves into the questions of Reifenstahl’s intentions either as a Nazi sympathizer or as simply and inspired filmmaker dedicated only to the art of filmmaking, coincidently employed by the Nazi party. I’ve always agreed with the view that, even though she is a brilliant documentarian and filmmaker, she was irresponsible, for such a brilliant mind, she was frustratingly sheltered and naive. Even into her old age she pretty much refused to acknowledge that she was a driving force in producing powerful Nazi propaganda. I wanted to see the stadium because the Riefenstahl question it is a piece of German history that relates importantly to media studies, my field. I felt like it might be a way for me to understand the incomprehensible history, in a practical way.
Seeing the stadium, it’s majestic beauty, on a German summer afternoon reminded me that architecture can be powerful propaganda. It speaks to our proprioceptive consciousness, right to the part of us that expands and travels outward when we enter a vast interior space. It’s sort of a simplistic building, it has a limited use. It is meant to make each member of the crowd view the world in a simple and unified way. This stadium is remarkably minimal in that way. It’s round, and without adornment. It’s actually hard to keep track of how far you’ve moved around the interior circle. It’s quite cathedral-like. The sky is framed and the eye wanders up to it trustingly, but the eye is captured more often by the obelisk that stands in a close-by field and is framed by the walls of the stadium. Its meant to catch the eye of the public, the one eye of the people, it’s meant to unify the public’s mind. All of these strategies seem quite obvious as mind controlling Nazi propaganda architecture, and the scary part about being there is that it’s quite beautiful.
Seeing the stadium was fascinating, and you too should see The Wonderful Horrible life of Leni Riefenstahl.
