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Email PageEllen Zweig 2006
October 26, 2006- December 2, 2006
Ellen Zweig
CUE Art Foundation
511 W 25th St Ellen Zweig Video Still, Testing the Waters (2006) |
“... there is a very distinctive poetry to Ellen’s camera. The pictures flow by with a cool, elegant musicality ...” – Eleanor Antin
Ellen Zweig’s site specific video installation, Testing the Waters, explores the artist’s ongoing fascination with China through witty and poignant observations of the cultural practices and minor details governing daily life. Fueled by childhood memories of Pearl Buck novels, ink paintings, Buddha statues and Chinese restaurants, Zweig set out to discover the China of her fantasies in 2000. She arrived there often finding that it indeed existed in the cherished traditions and the commonplace situations, gestures, words, and sounds, which populate daily life. Two video monitors placed at the entrance followed by video projections displayed as diptychs and triptychs throughout the exhibition space combine footage taken from the many hours that Zweig spent in China’s urban parks, city streets and in rural locales with constructed scenarios of an imagined China shot at home in New York. As a poet, performance, and video artist, Zweig is interested in exploring how the process of communication involves the layering of words, images, gestures, and sounds. Under her guidance, fragments of language appearing alone or, within the context of situations, actions, and performances on viewreveal the extent in which dialogue is subject to interpretation. In the current installation, visual imagery is accompanied by ambient sound tracks featuring a selection of street noises such as the pouring of rice or footsteps on pavement. Though muted, they add further immediacy and dimensionality to Zweig’s lyrical depictions of subject and place.
The title of the exhibition when literally translated from Chinese means “throw rock ask road". This phrase aptly describes the new developments at play in this current installment of Zweig’s continuing series. Rather than retaining the role of observer, the artist places herself directly into the frame in scenes ranging from her struggling to pronounce Chinese words and phrases, to duplicating in her kitchen at home the subtle movements of a woman who has casually dipped her hand in a bag of rice at the market. By focusing on very small, unconscious gestures, and by mimicking these types of movement as a form of self mockery, she captures the futility of her attempts to get inside the skin of another culture. “When I shoot, I often choose things that attract my curiosity without knowing whether or not they are indicative of the culture. I am depicting my fantasies about China from an outsider’s perspective, with a little reality seeping through by accident,” says Zweig.
Two large-scale projections further address the theme of imitation, by emphasizing how identity can be revealed and disguised through the conventions of Eastern and Western classical theatre. In one panel of the diptych, an American dressed as a Judge Bao (a popular character appearing in many Chinese operas), sings a few lines from traditional Chinese opera. In the accompanying panel, a young Chinese opera singer recites one of Viola’s speeches from Twelfth Night. Later, as the Westerner mimes the footwork of the opera character, Chinese couples dance a waltz. These cultural exchanges comically and poignantly expose both sides of the mirror: Westerners imitating China; and China imitating the West right back. Throughout the exhibition, Zweig humorously and poignantly exposes the deceptions and misinterpretations that sometimes occur when two cultures meet by directing the viewer’s attention to those inescapable, ironic moments in which earnestness and artifice collide.
Catalogue available.
Ellen Zweigis an artist who works with video, audio, installation and performance. Her most recent work is the video series, HEAP. As an installation, HEAP (Shanghai version), was exhibited at DDM Warehouse, Shanghai, China, in April, 2006. Three sections of HEAP were shown at the Thailand New Media Art Festival, 2004. (unsolved) Robert van Gulik screened at the Athens International Film & Video Festival, 2005. A surplus of landscape screened at the New York Video Festival, 2005 and at Images Contre Nature International Festival of Experimental Video, Marseilles, 2006. Zweig is presently working on a related series about her father. In her previous installations, Zweig has used optics to create camera obscuras, video projection devices, and miniature projected illusions. Her multi-channel video installations have toured the US and include The Invisible Woman... (P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 1993); Hubert’s Lure, (42nd St. Art Project, Creative Time, New York, 1994); Critical Mass (jointly with Meridel Rubinstein: Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, 1994; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, 1995; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 1997) among others. In the 1980s, she toured throughout the U.S, Europe and Australia with a series of performances, including those held at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1984); San Francisco Art Institute (San Francisco, 1984); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne, 1986); The Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, 1986); and The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 1991).
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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