Featured Artists
Alex Hubbard, Sung Hwan Kim, Meiro Koizumi, Anna Molska, Lucy Raven, Sara VanDerBeek, and Steve Roden
Vox Populi is happy to announce its annual guest curated exhibition, Bivouac. Departing from an 1896 George Méliès short that no longer exists, Bivouac includes film and video, photography, sculpture and drawings that utilize simple backdrops, meager sets, and improvised structures to position the performing body in tension with abstraction and fragmented attempts at narration. As the films of René Clair and Hans Richter once revised and expanded Méliès’ personification of objects and rudimentary theatrical effects, these contemporary works update and complicate tactics borrowed from Constructivist, Dadaist, and Fluxus-like approaches. In addition to the works on view, a live performance, conversation, and screening of art-historically relevant films will explore the form and critical potential of such ludic scenarios.
Anna Molska’s Tanagrama, 2006/07, encounters two muscular models, wearing only pads and futuristic helmets, arranging seven large blocks into a geometric shape that alludes to Malevich’s stage design for the Futurist play Victory Over the Sun (1913) as well as his subsequent ‘Black Square’ painting; Steve Roden’s anything else &/or nothing at all (drawing circles for jackson mac low), 2006, interprets a Fluxus score by the concrete poet Mac Low in the form of a direct animation layered on top of an existing 1950s educational film titled “drawing the circle.” A series of Roden’s drawings—all made according to rule-based procedures that extend from the artist’s body—will accompany the animation. Sara VanDerBeek’s photographs capture discrete sculptural set-ups that deftly reference figurative effigy, appropriated pop imagery, and modernist strategies of abstraction alike.
Lucy Raven’s Preenactment, 2008, re-contextualizes the performative reading of four picture books of Chinese propaganda from the mid 1970s that promote agriculture, industry, and the heroic role of the worker. Sung Hwan Kim’s Dog Video, 2006, acts out an abstracted comparison between two homes—one in Amsterdam and one in Seoul—and the house rules that apply in each domain. Kim will also present a live drawing/music performance during the run of the exhibition with his frequent collaborator composer David Michael DiGregorio on Saturday, April 18.
Alex Hubbard’s videos often begin with private performances as a flurry of assembled and destroyed materials rifle through performance art, painting, and magic tricks to create what Hubbard has called a kind of “Buster Keaton on a tabletop” aesthetic. And, Meiro Koizumi invites a Tokyo man to share an intimate memory even under the duress of responding to blunt questioning and sculptural directives in CraftNight, 2008.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Fionn Meade is writer and curator living in New York whose writing appears in Artforum, Parkett, Bidoun, BOMB, and The Fillip Review, among other publications. Recent and upcoming curatorial projects include a group exhibition Degrees of Remove: Landscape & Affect, co-curated with Sarina Basta at SculptureCenter, NY, this past fall, which included a series of related film programs at Anthology Film Archives; and Entr’acte, a group exhibition featuring the work of Cosima von Bonin, Tom Burr, Catherine Sullivan, and Artur Zmijewski which opens in March at The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.