Avantika Bawa
Rebecca Dimling Cochran
Michael Gibson and Carolyn Carr
Louise Shaw

Curator: Avantika Bawa

Technical Consultant: Matthew Burge

Artist/Video Details

Project: A Very Loud Silence

Artists: Caitlin Berrigan + Nathan Boyer + Matthew Burge + James Boorstein + Larry Caveney + Kiran Chandra + Vienne Chan+ Andrea Chung+ Agricola de Cologne+ Clint Enns+ Rachel Fainter+ Jonathan Franco+ Nicholas Fraser+ Henry Gwiazda  + Lizzie Hughes + Joseph Imhauser + Chelsea Knight + Ellie Krakow + Thessia Machado + Prema Murthy + Jeremy Newman + Richard O’Sullivan + Joo-Mee Paik + Julie Püttgen + Jeff Thompson + Austin Shull

In this age of anxiety, speed, mobility, conformity, access, excess and convenience dominate our culture. Over saturation of sounds and imagery proliferate, questioning our ability to resist. Conversely, the works in a very loud silence investigate the scope of emptiness, nothingness and the unspoken through manipulations of moving light. October 2^nd marks the birthday of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who maintained a vow of silence once a week. This project is homage to the power of silence and the work of Gandhi. The works in it investigate the potential of silent moving imagery to reflect intimacy, poetic beauty, total fear or a quiet rebellion.

Presented in collaboration with aquaspace.

Curator: Rebecca Dimling Cochran

Artist: Danielle Roney

Project: Mission

Mission is a word with multiple definitions: It can refer to a group of people, a journey, or a building. In choosing this word as the title for her site specific video projection, Danielle Roney embraces all three. The mobility of place and people, which lies at the heart of this piece, was suggested by the work’s particular surroundings. The nearby Baptist Mission suggests themes of the temporal storage of misplaced and transient peoples while human storage in the form of architecture is suggested by the structural building that serves as the site for the piece.

Rather than project on a single façade, Roney has chosen the difficult task of wrapping the digitally-produced video around the corner of the building. This provides an extended landscape for her personal footage of mobile citizenry (many who frequent the Baptist Mission itself) wrapped within Roney’s virtual, utopian landscape. Avatars revolve through and around these isolated humans, parallel inhabitants of their day-to-day existence.

Curators: Michael Gibson and Carolyn Carr

Project: 2 x 2

Artists: Nelson Hallonquist + Ryan McNamara

2009 has been a year of locating and reconnecting with grounding elements for economies and populations worldwide. It is the interest in the foundation elements rather than the grand gestures that has guided and informed this selection of works and artists.

For Le Flash 2009 we have chosen two video artists that use strategies that focus on small elements and repetitive actions to communicate. By stripping away dominant communicative elements and presenting only a single action or sequence of expressions the artists in this one night exhibition unlock the subconscious and allow the viewer to question what is being communicated and how and where they are located with respect to freedom of expression and movement.

By focusing the camera on a single repetitive action Ryan McNamara recorded Sam Spinning Infinitely, a work in which freedom through action is expressed with only a few elements.

Embracing the strategies of negation and appropriation, artist Nelson Hallonquist’s Gesticulations of an American Icon restructures “Bill Cosby: Himself” by removing all discernable language. The viewer is left with only facial expressions, gestures, and bizarre sounds as a means of reading the work for content, which reinforces how vital non-spoken language is to communication.

Curator: Louise Shaw

Project: We are Survival Machines

Artists: Carl DiSalvo and David Holstius

The future is now: Zombies vs. robots. The battle for humanity between the undead and sentient machines has commenced with humans as collateral.

Part Hollywood, part cultural commentary, We Are Survival Machines melds two potent symbols of popular culture–both with contemporary sub-texts–into a pulsating Cinemax-inspired immersive installation. Commissioned by The Andy Warhol Museum in 2008, Carl DiSalvo and David Holstius use actors, academic robots, and cutting-edge Gigapan technology to emulate the rich and, at times, gross-out traditions of both Zombie and robot films. And yes, the ultimate purveyor of popular culture–Andy Warhol himself–had his own fascination with both the living undead and those task-driven, often anthropomorphic machines that are meant to serve us.

This work is particularly relevant in 2009. Zombie culture is everywhere, with Zombies as stand-ins for bereft out-of-control systems that survive in a suspended reality of the undead, i.e. global financial systems. The field of robotics is a serious one, and robots have been doing a lot of our business for decades. But, there can be uneasiness about them, captured by both science fiction and horror writers, fueled by fears that we humans can lose control when robots surpass both our intelligence and skill levels. In fact, the title of this installation–We Are Survival Machines–is appropriated from the work of scientist Richard Dawkins in his description of humans. In DiSalvo’s and Holstius’ world-view, it is the Darwinian survival skills of robots and Zombies that fight for humanity. The battle has just begun.