Mutual: On Collaboration
December 19 - January 31, 2009
450 Harrison Avenue
Storefront 63
Boston, MA 02118
T 617 357 7177
Reception:
Friday, December 19th from 6 to 8PM
Gallery Hours:
Wednesdays to Saturday
11 to 5PM &, of course, by appointment
Samson Projects announces an exhibition, Mutual: on collaboration collaboratively curated with Kate McNamara of Cleopatra’s (www.cleopatras.us).
Antoniadis & Stone -- assume vivid astro focus -- Bernadette Corporation -- Bernd & Hilla Becher -- Claire Fontaine -- Davis, Cherubini -- Freeman/Phelan -- GuytonWalker -- Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn -- K48 -- Los Carpinteros -- Mike + Doug Starn -- My Barbarian -- LELLO//ARNELL -- Paper Rad -- robbinschilds -- SLEEP
Articulating a genre that is shaped by apprehending multiplicity, this exhibition is a forum for discussing collaborative/collective art practices & acts as an aesthetic investigation of current motivations. Even though a tenet for the exhibition is self-similarity, we should enhance the iterative within the collaboration not within the exposition this/thus preserving the immutable object.
The relationships & objects demonstrate & respond to a rhizomatic form, an elaboration provided by Deleuze & Guattari, insinuating that these artistic identities, modes of production, objects, & thought process' are all diverse and non-linear forms, not unlike a bulb or tuber with roots moving in all directions. Rootstock (another D & G reference) can be attenuated as a collaborative formation that is normative and recursive. There is a crossing over & redefining through the negation of specific art forms or concrete ideas – simultaneously an assemblage & de-collage.
For some, it is sometimes about how one individual’s artwork relates to another's - as with Davis, Cherubini, Freeman/Phelan & GuytonWalker where the artists both maintain their individual practices, but come together to address an object in combination. The result is a vocabulary derived from either individual; visual citations which allude to both artists.
assume vivid astro focus' decals dismantle conventional authorship by disrupting the notion of artist as ‘heroic’ solitary figure. avaf is an ongoing multimedia effort initiated by Brazilian-born artist Eli Sudbrack. His installations & performances are generated with the help of a changing cast of artists including DJs, dancers, sculptors, & filmmakers. Always under the name of assume vivid astro focus, Sudbrack refuses individual credit.
A publication, K48, has a revolving cast of collaborators often including an audio supplement & presented within gallery installations or social environments. Scott Hug has edited & organized seven issues to date of K48, each publication organized around a theme. Starship Counterforce, issue #7, “explores space, science fiction and our race toward the future”.
Paper Rad is an artist collective whose work comes in the form of comics, zines, web art, music & video. While there are many contributing affiliates, the three primary members are Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci & Ben Jones. http://www.paperrad.org, an integral part of their practice, making available an entire archive of projects, videos & comics to the public, as well as acts as a community space for each member to update one another on current projects.
My Barbarian is a self-proclaimed performance troupe that incorporates music, video & live performance. The trio (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon & Alejandro Segade ) creates & performs in site-specific plays, musical concerts, theatrical situations & video installations that explore contemporary political challenges by playing out allegorical narratives drawn from history & mythology. Theater is reliant on multiple participants including audience & My Barbarian uses live gestures & song to challenge curatorial tactics & art practices. The 2-channel video exhibited, The Golden Age, was recently on view at the New Museum.
Exhibiting for the 1st time in the US, LELLO//ARNELL (Jørgen Craig Lello, born 1978 in Fredrikstad, Norway & Tobias Arnell, born 1978 in Lund, Sweden). The artists have collaborated since they met at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo in 2003. “Fixed Point (North) and Fixed Point (South) force a structured and symmetrical view of the world - or heavens - by providing an additional point from which to calculate navigational data. It's single shortcoming would have to be that is not in fact accurate. The motives themselves are cut out of sheets of aluminum, providing a highly sculptural approach to the graphical.”
Antoniadis & Stone (Alexi Antoniadis & Nico Stone) have known each other for quite awhile. "Man Up! is a monument to the rituals and the fumbling sexuality of boyhood. We reference moments from an un-evolved time in a young man’s life. We explore these moments both formally and anthropologically to uncover truths about male identity."
Gilbert & George place themselves, their thoughts and feelings at the center of their work. Give Me the Moonlight, is generously donated to raise funds for the Brooklyn Museum on the occasion of their retrospective exhibition, open through January 11, 2009.
Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn live and work in LA. Dodge and Kahn employ video as a tool to dramatize the longing that underpins interpersonal expression, the desire for contact and some sense of personal agency. What at first might seem like random decisions in the works— unorthodox choices for location, wardrobe, and editing— are carefully poised to produce scenarios that flirt with slapstick without diluting their characters’ basic humanity. Their work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
robbinschilds is a performance-based duo whose background in dance is presented in highly visual time-based works that explore the intersection between architecture & human movement. Incorporating installation, photography, & video, robbinschilds often works within the context of other collaborative efforts. For the C.L.U.E (color location ultimate experience) series, robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins) worked with A.L. Steiner, AJ Blandford, & Kinski.
“Reena Spaulings is a collectively-authored novel set in present-day New York. What is today? What is a city? These are two of the many questions this book sets out to ask.” The artist-collective Bernadette Corporation was founded in a nightclub in 1994 organizing spontaneous, purposeless events in public space then morphing into a fashion label, Reena Spaulings is now an art gallery in NYC.
“We thought that Sleep embodied a language for the work & the artists. The sunglasses pop off the piece & illuminate as if a sunset or a sunrise. Sleep (Todd Pavlisko & Max Schubert) is the confluence of the truest truth and the darkest secret radically brought to life through armchair dream analysis performed by two patently mischievous dreamers addicted to the thrill of the unknown.”
Mike + Doug Starn (NJ, 1961) identical twins, work collaboratively with photography, effectively combining traditionally separate disciplines such as sculpture, painting, video and installation. They graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (1985).
Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a "readymade artist" and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. "In presenting what is essentially a non-screening of Anderson and Lee’s sexual exploits, Where are We leaves space for an alternate narrative to emerge; one that is not a banal critique of Western love in the form of a plastic Pammy and rock star Tommy Lee. The question that arises from between the blank screen and the subtitles is, who can say that Pammy and Tommy Lee’s is not a genuinely contemporary model of true love?"
Los Carpinteros is made up of Cuban-born artists: Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, & Dagoberto Rodriguez. Much of their work incorporates the use of hand tools, wood & items which are used by a carpenter. They adopted the name Los Carpinteros in 1994 after critics & fellow artists began referring to them as such. For Los Carpinteros the name identifies them with guilds of tobacco workers, sugar cane workers & carpenters, rather than an immediate identification with art production.
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