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BrainWave: Common Senses

February 16, 2008- April 19, 2008

Reception: February 16, 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Andrew Carnie, Fernando Orellana, David Bowen, Jamie O'Shea, Suzanne Anker, Phil Buehler, Devorah Sperber, George Jenne, Dustin Wenzel, Naho Taruishi, Steve Budington, Daniel Margulies, Chris Sharp

Exit Art

475 10th Ave


One of New York City’s leading outposts for vanguard art showcases an array of artworks inspired by recent advances in the understanding of the brain beginning Saturday, February 16, 2008. On view at Exit Art at Tenth Avenue and 36th Street through April 19, BrainWave: Common Senses is part of the city-wide festival BRAINWAVE, which explores how art, music, and meditation affect the brain. In organizing Common Senses, Exit Art co-directors Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo looked for artists who are creating powerful visualizations of the activities of the mind. Works run the gamut from mechanical objects—including a roving robot—to videos, multiple-screen slide projections, sculpture, and painting.

“In sending out an open call to artists, we hoped to find works of art that captured the mystery of the mind, rather than works that merely illustrate scientific insights. We have succeeded in this, I believe, by gathering artworks that are of the moment—innovative as art, current as science,” says Ingberman.

Visitors to Common Senses will spy a 15" tall robot navigating Exit Art in directions determined by data derived from artist Fernando Orellana’s REM-sleep brainwave activity. Sleep Waking (2007), created by the Troy, New York-based Orellana in collaboration with Brendan Burns, of Schenectady, New York, is one of a number of ambulatory and interactive works in the exhibition. Another is Swarm (2008), by David Bowen of Duluth, Minnesota, a roaming device shaped like a broomstick, capped by a bulbous plastic chamber filled with 500 buzzing houseflies. Digitally, the motion of the flies determines Swarm’s direction and momentum. As well, New Yorker Jamie O’Shea contributes his mad machine, the Alvin sonic incubator (2005), wherein a visitor can set an electronic neural-like network in motion by connecting his or her forehead to Alvin’s hardware.

Brilliantly colored images evocative of a dense forest are conjured from the layering of light projections in Andrew Carnie’s Magic Forest (2002). The result of the artist’s collaboration with Dr. Richard Wingate of the Medical Research Council Centre for Developmental Neurology, Kings College, London, the 15-minute-long installation piece takes as its subject the process of data collecting in an ever-growing cluster of neurons in a developing brain. The beauty of the images derives in part from the fluorescence used in staining of individual neurons, which in turn produces the images under a microscope.

The New York-based artist Suzanne Anker also is represented by beautiful, lyrical imagery arising from careful extrapolation of neurological processes. Here, three-dimensional Rorschach tests resemble fossils from a lost world and brain scans and images of butterfly wings suggest the organic complexity of the brain and archetypes from the natural world.

Windows of the Soul (2008), a video by New York artist Phil Buehler, invites the question of whether or not one can read madness in another’s eyes. Three hundred close-up black and white photographs of the eyes of actual mental patients, taken in the ‘50s and recently recovered from an archive, speed by in a riveting five-minute-long montage.

For BrainWave: Common Senses, New Yorker Devorah Sperber constructs what will appear to be a random arrangement of 875 spools of colored thread in the Exit Art gallery. Remarkably, the spools coalesce into a seemingly sharp focus replica of Leonardo da Vinci's “Mona Lisa” when viewed through a small sphere that mimics the functioning of the human eye.

Other works on view include a sculptural installation by George Jenne of Brooklyn, New York, that incorporates a variety of objects that the artist calls “tokens,” which are designed to trigger associations with adolescence; two sculptures created by casting the brain cavities of whales into brass by Dustin Wenzel of Ottawa, Canada; a single-channel video by Naho Taruishi (New York, New York) meant to be seen “blindly” with eyelids closed (functioning as a pair of internal projection screens); a mural-size painting by Steve Budington of Burlington, Vermont, depicts the dangers of a political candidate favoring one sense over another; a video by Daniel Margulies (New York) and Chris Sharp (Milan, Italy) coupling Kant’s Third Critique of Judgment and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring with brain scans; and Reodorant (2008), a multisensory installation by the four-member artist collective, SERU.

BrainWave: Common Senses is the second in Exit Art’s Unknown Territories series exploring the impact of scientific advances on contemporary culture. It follows Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution, a landmark exhibition of art and biotechnology that brought art and science audiences together at Exit Art in 2000. Opening December 6, 2008 will be the third presentation, of biotechnology based artworks. Organized by Boryana Rossa, Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) will assemble work by many of the major artists working in this medium, including Adam Zaretsky, Stelarc, Bioteknica, Kathy High, Dmitry Bulatov and SymbioticA Research Group, an Australia-based collective that will produce a wet laboratory in collaboration with scientists for the exhibition. Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) will travel to Russia in 2009.

PUBLIC EVENTS / BrainWave: Common Senses

Joseph Ledoux The Amygdaloids Friday, February 29, 2008, 6-8 pm

Pioneering researcher Joseph LeDoux, the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU's Center for Neural Science and the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety conducts a walk-through of BrainWave: Common Senses, discussing brain-related issues along the way. His band The Amygdaloids plays afterwards. Free.

A Night of Trance Music Friday, March 14, 7-10 pm

Exit Art presents a night of “trance” music with Zach Layton’s real-time sound manipulation of an electroencephalograph (EEG), Wind-Up Bird’s quadraphonic drone rotations, and Raphael Lyon’s hypnotic “cinema-in-the-dark,” Psicklops. Free.

Matt Mullican Wednesday, March 19, 7-9 pm *Date Change - TBA

Artist Matt Mullican screens a video of his performances made while under hypnosis and discusses his work in relation to perception, the subconscious, and his personal cosmology of symbols. Concurrent with the artist’s presentation in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Free.

Kent and Kevin Young present ‘A Monozygotic Experiment Using Telepathic Conveyance’ Friday, April 11, 2008, 6:30-8 pm

Los Angeles-based artists Kent and Kevin Young will make a ‘painting’ by trying to solve a crossword puzzle from clues telepathically sent from one twin brother to the other. Free

EXHIBITION SUPPORT Brainwave: Common Senses is supported by a grant from the Greenwall Foundation. Additional exhibition support provided by Carnegie Corporation, Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Starry Night Fund at The Tides Foundation, Exit Art’s Board of Trustees, our members, Union College and the Albany Regional Sleep Disorders Center. Public programs support provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Books and DVDs related to artists in this show

Location   Gallery Exit Art Address 475 10th Ave New York (Chelsea) NY, 10018 United States Phone 212-966-7745 Fax 212-925-2928 Hours Mon-Fri 12-6, closed Sat and Sun; Fall hours: Tue-Thu 10-6, Fri 10-8, Sat 12-8

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