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Email PageFacing the Present that Night at Otter Lake
January 6, 2006- February 4, 2006
Gerald Petit
LMAK projects
526 W 26th StLMAKprojects is proud to celebrate its first birthday with the inauguration of Facing the present that night at Otter Lake, Gerald Petit’s first solo show in New York City.
As in his former works, this new installation, which incorporates paintings, photographs and video, exhibits Petit's signature style of flirting with the concept of hyper presentation.
Last year, while in New York, Petit experienced with forming personal acquaintances with different people through virtual chat rooms. With the material and testimonies he gathered, he shot a short video which focused on the friction the personal experiences of a young man create with his immediate physical and social surroundings, or in other words, the illusional autonomy and independence of the private world within the larger context of the external public world.
Although this video is not included in the current show, it has served as a guiding principle in the installation's conceptual development.As a background for the central installation, Petit covered the gallery's walls with an impressively realistic, almost hologram-like, image of a constellation of stars in deep space, creating a secluded corridor to a cloned universe.
The works on view make visual references to different virtual scenes from the original video, such as readings, conversations and discussions. Through the materialization of these indirect events, Petit confronts and shatters the myth of the totality of human rationalization of missing visual links in the narrative of 'given' everyday routines.
A working artist must struggle with the dominance and charisma of his or her predecessors.
As the literature critic, Harold Bloom, wrote in The Anxiety of Influence, in the cultural context of the Freudian approach to the rebellion of children against the control and influences of their parents, the battle with the past can often seemingly result with its replication by the children.
Nevertheless, however overbearing the past may be, the heritage of preceding artistic visual and conceptual innovations, can still nourish the growth and evolvement of creativity in the practice of making art in the present. Born from the perpetual linkages between past and present, and between current art studios and their past practices, is the artwork that claims its own identity, and in turn, also produces the seeds of the next generation of artists.
Regeneration Room is an experimental embodiment of this ongoing spiral evolvement of art, as its nature is both cycloid and continuous.
Seventeen artists were chosen for the project, while each was randomly assigned a place in a succession of 'generations', taking the form of a variation on the structure of a family tree.
Beginning from the top with a work by one artist, each successive 'generation', represented by the work of the following artist, comprises a seed to the next 'generation' in line: A piece of paper with an ink transfer from an ink jet print of a small part (a seed) of prior generation finished work. A jpeg of the full drawing from which the seed was extracted was also given to each artist. From the different 'seeds', with which each artist was assigned to use in his or her work, the artists were asked to create whatever they thought was relevant to their individual artistic practices. The only limitations were size (maximum scope of 22” x 22”), dimensionality (only two dimensional works were accepted), time of execution (limited to four weeks), and a noticeable retention of the original seed.
The project thus explores several fundamental questions regarding the nature of the artistic practice: (1) How clearly does the artist’s individual identity emerge from a given seed, or rather a raw conceptual material; (2) How easily can a viewer notice linkages between the artist's individuality and the 'familial' impacts on his or her work; and, (3) How effectively can the artist overcome the burdening weight of the success of earlier artists, in order to use the power of the past productively.
To ensure the veracity of the exploration of these questions, only artists who regularly employ a wide range of studio practices were selected. In addition, the level of exhibiting experience of the artists selected, ranged from significantly great to nearly poor, and any potential curatorial bias regarding subjectively preconceived linkages between specific artists, was avoided by the curator's use of a special computer program, which randomly determined the placement of the artists in the succession of the family tree.
The individual works presented in the project demonstrate the variety of approaches different artists use in order to creatively integrate the seeds of external influences and past heritages in their work, such as elements of the seed narrative (Holly Coulis, Bart De Koning Gans, Gina Magid), the original seed as part of the artistic process (Randy Wray, Chris Jahncke, Jason Duval, Elana Herzog, Julia Rand all), using the seed as a formal determinant for the conceptual development (Devin Leonardi, Perry Hu, Ann Pibal, Amanda Church, Ruby Palmer), use of the seed as the conceptual core (Joyce Kim), a seemingly incidental use of the seed (Federico Solmi and Satoru Eguchi), or rather employing its absence from the work (Melanie Baker, the metaphorical Eve of the project, who was denied a seed for herself since she was randomly selected as the artist to create the original seed, which would trigger the succession of the following works).
Regeneration Room hopes to enliven and challenge the practices of working artists by attempting to prove that art cannot be created in vacuums, that it is constantly influenced by innovations from the past, and that even in our current generation, and withing its no less powerful influences, artists can still create ways to find voices that identifiably represent their own, while engaging in a dialogue with the past.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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LMAK projects was last updated: 2008-10-12
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