ARTIST LINKS
A Gert-Jan Akerboom B Michelle Blade C Bill Conger D Paul Diddy E F Vanina Feldsztein | Melissa Frost G H David Horvitz | Zach Houston I J K Chrisopher Kline | Alexis Knowlton L Verónica Lehner | Little Friends of Printmaking M Caitlin Maisley | Anna María Millán N O Mira O’brien | Ernesto Ortiz P Erik Parra | Anne Polashenski Q R S Tobias Sternberg | Sumi Ink Club T Jeffrey Treviño U V Paul Vasquez W Kandis Williams X Y Z
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PAUSE
Golden PARACHUTES will be closed until the opening of Total Vivid Presence, September 11th, 2010.
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TOTAL VIVID PRESENCE
Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10, video still, Paul Vasquez, 2010
Featuring works by Michelle Blade, Christopher Kline, Jeffrey Treviño, and Paul Vasquez
September 11th- October 15th, 2010
Vernissage: September 11th, 7-10pm
In his definitive study of shamanism the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade writes “any cultural moment whatever can provide the fullest revelation of the sacred to which the human condition is capable of acceding.”
Golden Parachutes is pleased to present Total Vivid Presence, a group exhibition exploring representations of ritual, magic, and ecstatic experience in art, technology, and popular media. Total Vivid Presence will include works by Michelle Blade and Christopher Kline, a computer program created by the composer Jeffrey Treviño, and a loop of the Youtube sensation Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10.
The sacred and the banal meet in “rainbow hunter” Paul Vasquez’s video, which served as the inspiration for the exhibition. Before the American comedian Jimmy Kimmel discovered his video Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10, in which Vasquez breaks down in tears while recording a rainbow in his backyard, he had been posting hundreds of amateur nature videos on his Youtube page in obscurity. While the video is admittedly funny, it treatment in popular media reduces Vasquez’s ecstatic encounter to a poorly socialized overreaction. Indeed, Vasquez’s video shows us the distance between representation and experience, between what is seen and what is felt. In a classic encounter with the sublime, Vasquez experiences the limits of sensibility, sharing with his viewers the pleasure and terror that accompanies this experience.
Michelle Blade will present an iteration of her ongoing Painting as a Vehicle series, immersive multi-paneled paintings which derive their imagery from mythology, literature, and esoteric thought. The works are installed on both the wall and floor of the exhibition space, creating an immersive optical experience.
Christopher Kline’s body of individual and collaborative works offer complex and personal redefinitions of the sacred. Kline creates elaborate ritualistic costumes, objects, and environments that combine elements from forgotten and misremembered traditions to create a microcosmic world with its own symbology. Kline will create a site specific work for Total Vivid Presence, including an offsite performance or installation. Snakebraid will perform at the vernissage.
As a tool of spiritual teaching, the mandala has been used in many traditions to aid in creating sacred space. Composer Jeffrey Treviño created a pattern generating program he using MIT’s experimental coding program Field. Mandalas created with the program will be projected in a window installation.
A small catalog will be produced for the exhibition featuring artworks and found images selected by Golden Parachutes and the participating artists responding to the theme of Total Vivid Presence.
Two Events will accompany the exhibition:
Friday, September 24, 2010
7-10 pm
WR: Mysteries of the Organism
What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision WR: Mysteries of the Organism begins as an investigation into the life and work of controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and then explodes into a free-form narrative of a beautiful young Slavic girl’s sexual liberation. Banned upon its release in the director’s homeland, the art-house smash WR is both whimsical and bold in its blending of politics and sexuality.
- Criterion Collection Synopsis
Saturday, October 2nd, 2010
Musical performance by Episch
7-10 pm
Episch is an aural collaboration between Paul Diddy (guitar, sitar, voice), Carl Johns (keyboard, guitar, drums), and Emily Farrel (flute) that arose out of their self-identification of the genre “epic jams,” songs longer than 7 minutes and generally released during the 1970s. Episch uses these works alongside other world folk musics as a basis for inspiration and improvisation.
Posted in FUTURE, frontpage
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SITE EXPLORATION: Mira O’Brien, Verónica Lehner, Alexis Knowlton, and Ana María Millán
Site Exploration: Phase Two
June 26th through July 16th, 2010
Vernissage: Saturday, June 26th, 5-8pm
Golden Parachutes is pleased to present Site Exploration, the culmination of a collaborative residency at the gallery initiated by Mira O’Brien and undertaken with three other Berlin based artists: Verónica Lehner, Alexis Knowlton, and Ana María Millán.
At its core, Site Exploration is an investigation of space. Driven by an impulse to bridge spatial and experiential gaps inherent in most site-specific work, the artists used Golden Parachutes as an institutional and geographic anchor for the exploration of sites adjacent to the gallery. A semi-vacant lot was chosen approximately 250 meters away from Golden Parachutes and sustained engagement with the site provided both the inspiration and many of the materials for the creation of a number of new works. Numerous approaches were taken to explore the spatial qualities of the site, gallery, and surrounding environs, among them surveying, documenting, transferring, recording, altering, and mapping.
The resulting works emphasize actions and interventions that continually constitute each space anew. Verónica Lehner’s ich dinge, die dinge ichen posits a physical and temporal engagement with the physical parameters of the selected site and its material components. In this work Lehner organizes rocks found on the site and traces their contours in paint before tying them with string and dragging them down Kreuzbergstr and into the exhibition space. Lehner began dragging the rocks at the beginning of the residency and will continue to do so intermittently over the course of the exhibition. This ephemeral, dynamic work is the result of a repetitive process that charts an intimate, performative engagement with space that can be further witnessed in the accumulating pile of rocks at Golden Parachutes.
During the course of the residency, the act of surveying and measuring were vital aspects of Mira O’Brien’s active observational process. Spanning nearly 4 meters by 4.6 meters, O’Brien’s new painting depicts the columns of a massive parking structure found on the site. After realizing that the space between the pillars was approximate to the length of the gallery wall, O’Brien created a scale reproduction of the structure, which curves around the ceiling and pillars of the exhibition space.
A new video work by Ana María Millán features the Schwerbelastungskörper, a 12,650 ton concrete behemoth constructed to test the ability of Berlin’s sandy soil to withstand Third Reich architect Albert Speer’s plans for Welthauptstadt Germania. Constructed on the proposed site of a massive Triumphal Arc, the Schwerbelastungskörper, is adjacent to the site chosen for Site Exploration. Continuing in the vein of her personal practice and its abiding concern with black holes in history and the relationship between official and marginal memories and culture, Millán’s video stages a performance of the iconicLili Marleen by Romanian musicians on accordion and trumpet.
Primarily inspired by the huge amounts of dirt under the parking garage on the site, Alexis Knowlton quickly associated the muck and mire of the site with pigs and decided to interpolate the narrative space of E.B. White’s acclaimed children’s book Charlotte’s Web into the site. Charlotte’s Web Allegoryis a response to both the physical attributes of the site, as well as the collaborative aspects of the residency and exhibition. Over the course of the residency Knowlton created abstract interpretations of fellow artists’ projects. Knowlton will weave a web made of string around the columns of the parking structure on the site, referencing the scene in Charlotte’s Web in which Wilbur attempts to create a web of his own. Knowlton will also create a model of the plans for the Germania project out of food objects from the Lidl (located atop the parking structure).
In order to facilitate the movement between site and gallery, a guide has been created. Conceived of as the third “site,” the book includes maps, photographs, and texts relating to the different phases of Site Exploration.
For further information or reproduction quality images please email jesi@goldenparachutes.net or call (0) 30 86 45 22 22.
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