SPRING 2010 EXHIBITIONS: ARTISTS EXPLORE SCREEN SPACE
RYAN TRECARTIN: ANY EVER
SHARON LOCKHART: PODWÓRKA
PETER CAMPUS: REFLECTIONS AND INFLECTIONS
JOACHIM KOESTER: HYPNAGOGIA
26 March – 24 May 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, 25 March, 8–11 PM
THE POWER PLANT
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto, Ontario M5J 2G8
Canada
‘Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever,’ the first Canadian solo exhibition by the young American artist, is a sprawling seven-video suite amalgamating his ambitious new four-part series, Re’Search Wait’S as well as his 2009 video triptych Trill-ogy Comp. Destabilizing and amazing his audiences, Trecartin’s hyperactive and collaborative performance and video art practice embraces a lo-fi aesthetic of chaotic excess to realize his heady explorations of consumer culture and fractured identity in the digital age. With an insomniac energy and frenetic editing, Trecartin choreographs a cracked parallel universe only slightly more surreal than the one we actually inhabit. His largest project to date, ‘Any Ever’ will be staged inside a network of “containers” in The Power Plant’s largest gallery, and will subsequently tour internationally. ‘Any Ever’ is curated by Senior Curator of Programs Helena Reckitt and Assistant Curator of Public Programs Jon Davies.
Ryan Trecartin (born in Webster, Tex., 1981) has had recent solo exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2008), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008), and Kunsthalle Wien (2009). In 2009 Trecartin was named New Artist of the Year in the First Annual Art Awards at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
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SHARON LOCKHART: PODWÓRKA
‘Podwórka’ captures six groups of neighbourhood youth as they play in seemingly deserted yards, offering an intimate portrait of daily life in Łódz, Poland. Shot with a fixed camera, this single-channel video projection highlights American artist Sharon Lockhart’s concern for the interrelationship between the still and the moving image. Evolving from past works for which Lockhart has entered into a community to document its inhabitants—such as Pine Flat (2005), the result of three years spent in a small town in the Sierra Nevada—Podwórka evidences the artist’s nuanced anthropological gaze. The work’s meditative pace and absence of defined narrative affords Lockhart’s subjects a sense of freedom that also extends to the viewers, who are encouraged to imagine stories for the children portrayed, beyond the space of the screen. Curated by Director of The Power Plant Gregory Burke and Artistic Director of the Images Festival Pablo de Ocampo, ‘Podwórka’ is co-presented with the 23rd Images Festival
Sharon Lockhart (born in Norwood, Mass., 1964) is based in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions of her acclaimed film and photography work have been organized by Secession, Vienna (2008), Kunstverein, Hamburg (2008) and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2009).
CO-PRESENTED WITH
Images Festival
PETER CAMPUS: REFLECTIONS AND INFLECTIONS
Since the 1970s, American artist Peter Campus’ has consistently explored the formal properties and possibilities of video. ‘Peter Campus: Reflections and Inflections’ juxtaposes the iconic early work Anamnesis (1974) with a new multi-channel video, Inflections: change in light and color around Ponquogue Bay (2009), spanning thirty-five years of Campus’s pioneering practice and his move from treating video as a sculptural to a pictorial medium. Part of an early body of the artist’s work examining the medium’s capacity for transforming viewers’ perceptions of self and of duration in the gallery space, Anamnesis confronts viewers with a closed-circuit video feed of themselves; however, its three-second delay disorients one’s experience of time and embodiment. By contrast, Inflections … fills six monitors with its hypnotic, slowed-down images of Ponquogue Bay, Long Island, digitally processed to create painterly abstract landscapes that hover between stillness and motion. Curated by Director Gregory Burke.
Peter Campus (born in New York, 1937) is based on East Patchogue, New York, and has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bremen (2004), Albion Gallery, London (2007), and the British Film Institute, London (2009–10).
JOACHIM KOESTER: HYPNAGOGIA
Dancers convulse and gyrate, enacting symptoms of a spider’s bite in a riff on the Southern Italian dance the tarantella; a man mimes actions that channel shamanic gestures; abstract squiggles evoke the experience of writing after consuming mescaline. Hypnagogia, the threshold between consciousness and sleep, is explored in the three 16mm films that comprise Joachim Koester’s first solo show in Canada: Tarantism (7 min., 2007), My Frontier is an Endless Wall of Points (after the mescaline drawings of Henri Michaux) (11 min., 2007) and To navigate, in a genuine way, in the unknown necessitates an attitude of daring, but not one of recklessness (movements generated from the Magical Passes of Carlos Castaneda) (3min, 2009). These films suggest conscious and unconscious states and gestures, irrationality, loss of control and possession, and the “fringes of the body” that Koester terms “the grey zone.” Koester’s first solo show in Canada, ‘Hypnagogia’ is organized by Senior Curator of Programs Helena Reckitt.
Joachim Koester (born Copenhagen, 1962) is based in Copenhagen and Brooklyn, and represented Denmark in the 2005 Venice Biennale. Recent solo shows have taken place at Extra City, Antwerp (2007) and Overgaden, Copenhagen (2008).
