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Email PagePool
April 26, 2006- May 27, 2006
Steven Rose
Florence Lynch Gallery
531 W 25th StDuration: 3.58 minutes.
April 20 – May 27, 2006
Opening reception: Thursday, April 20, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Florence Lynch is proud to present Pool on view in <<Rewind<<, the gallery’s film, video and electronic media space.
Steven Rose's Pool was produced on next to nothing. It was shot with an inexpensive digital camera fixed on a mini tripod: it could capture no more than thirty consecutive seconds of low-resolution video. But the meanness of the equipment was neither a formal choice nor obedience to a dogma. While an experienced videographer, Rose simply had not foreseen making his Pool until an hour before the shooting. He was forced to make do. So one does in a void.
Pool is free of landmarks; the location could be any plot of earth beneath the azure sky where one might install an in-ground pool. Still, the landscape is not generic. The haecciety of an existence is there. While Rose, through his art, does not reveal which pool it is, or which one o'clock in the afternoon it is, the fact that this is a pool and a one o'clock in the afternoon can hardly escape notice. For the video contains no indication that the images have universal value. "Not the right ideas, just images," as Godard, and Deleuze after him, would declare. (full essay)
Steven Rose was born in San Diego, California in 1976. He received his degree in video and film from Florida State University in 1997 before setting out on an investigative journey of his home state in video and in photography, including a professional stint as a producer and videographer for a Central Florida news station. Steven continued his work as a freelance photographer in London for the next three years before returning to New York in April of 2003.
Steven has participated in various exhibitions and experimental forums including the Green Door Art Show in Tribeca (2004), inaugural Big Art Show in Brooklyn (2005), and a curatorial and participatory role in Everything’s in Order, a show at Oiseau Russell Art Gallery in Queens (2005). He has also collaborated on numerous projects: he was assistant director and principle performer of Eastern Standard Time (video produced and directed by Carlo Ferraris and exhibited in the Florence Lynch Gallery in 2005). Recently he was awarded the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) for art research and planning in Berlin (2005).
<<Rewind<< is a space at the Florence Lynch Gallery created exclusively for video and film. With its debut in September 2005, the objective of <<Rewind<< is to provide a platform for new and challenging film and video works which push the boundaries of cinema and art. Both established and young video/filmmakers are included in the program selected by Florence Lynch as well as invited independent and museum curators from around the world.
Viewing hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am – 6pm. For further information please contact Florence Lynch or Provie Landor at 212-924-3290.
Pool by Steven Rose
Steven Rose's Pool was produced on next to nothing. It was shot with an inexpensive digital camera fixed on a mini tripod: it could capture no more than thirty consecutive seconds of low-resolution video. But the meanness of the equipment was neither a formal choice nor obedience to a dogma. While an experienced videographer, Rose simply had not foreseen making his Pool until an hour before the shooting. He was forced to make do. So one does in a void.
Pool is free of landmarks; the location could be any plot of earth beneath the azure sky where one might install an in-ground pool. Still, the landscape is not generic. The haecciety of an existence is there. While Rose, through his art, does not reveal which pool it is, or which one o'clock in the afternoon it is, the fact that this is a pool and a one o'clock in the afternoon can hardly escape notice. For the video contains no indication that the images have universal value. "Not the right ideas, just images," as Godard, and Deleuze after him, would declare.
Pool could serve as commentary on a certain kind of human culture: a reflection on the anxiety of life poolside in sunny, buggy places.... And the hermeneut could readily find solid examples to contextualize Pool in the history of fiction: take Samuel Butler's novel Erewhon, a satire of Victorian society, which is also set in a "nowhere" (the anagram of Erewhon being Nowhere). But such an interpretation is destined to leave unappeased the why or for what of Rose's video.
Meanwhile, we might (with more modesty) try to describe a signature motif of Pool. Surprisingly, the anagram of Pool is also enlightening. For Pool is structurally a continuous loop of 3'48". Why a loop? As we watch, each loop phenomenally differs from the last; so how are we to understand the nature of repetition? We are presented with two similar looking men---yet the video gives us no reason to think that above and beyond them exists "a third man" bearing properties which they both instantiate individually. But there is an organismic repetition to witness nevertheless. How is it that life repeats itself without compromising the singularity of the beings who constitute it? The answer is simply that those beings die. Death permits realism about biological repetition insofar as it guarantees that each iteration differs---in the real---from the last. If eros insinuates itself ineluctably into the corporeal absence traced by Hockney's splash, then the central image of Rose's Pool---a submerged, vacant deck chair---surely marks the passage of Thanatos.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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