Floating Architecture and Constant Centers: Some Projections August 27 – September 27, 2008
The Martin Art Gallery in the Baker Center for the Arts at Muhlenberg College presents an inaugural video exhibition, Floating Architecture and Constant Centers: Some Projections, August 27 – September 27, 2008.Monday, August 18, 2008 01:59 PM
A reception will be held in the Martin Art Gallery, Wednesday, September 3, 4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Floating Architecture is guest curator Bartholomew Ryan’s intriguing exploration of identity and the relationship of identity to place. In developing the theme, he chose to work with young, international video artists whose imagery is as varied as their individual backgrounds. Ryan compiled six separate and distinct videos made by Yvonne Buchanan, Jana Eske, Yael Bartana, Kota Ezawa, Dionn Meade & Mary Simpson, and Dawit L. Petros and looped them to be shown continually on one projector. Most were produced using a long shot of a single scene with no cuts.
In Harlem, Buchanan documented young children in a typical urban playground. Using grainy black-and-white Super-8 film, Mead & Simpson captured anonymous legs and feet moving rapidly in an undeterminable location of brick and gravel.
Ezawa used a laborious animation technique to reduce a suburban tract home to an iconic representation of contemporary suburban angst, while Eske employed an aquatic vantage point to shoot a building complex in Helsinki, Finland. Finally, painterly references were made by Petros who framed a Canadian lake as a landscape and by Bartana who shot a Vermeer-like, frame-within a-frame viewpoint of a Purim celebration in Jerusalem.
The exhibition and all gallery events are open to the public and free of charge. Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon – 9:00 p.m.; closed during major holidays and semester breaks. For information, contact Kathryn Burke in the Martin Art Gallery office, 484.664.3467.
